Reddit was antagonistic when they removed moderators from subreddits, banned their accounts, and did everything else they possibly could to quell the protests. The behavior they’re exhibiting to this day isn’t new.
This was the first thing I assumed would happen when they announced the API pricing. A lot of spam prevention and deletion (hell, a lot of moderation period) is done by bots that use the API, made by people that likely can’t pay the new exorbitant fees to keep those going.
Most bots actually would continue working, the free API allows for 100 requests a minute which for most is enough, and they have been manually adding exemptions for moderation bots that need more. The question is if the creators are willing to continue supporting them, for free, in the future. Plenty understandably do not.
Also currently being a moderator (of any subreddit) allows you to bypass both the the rate limit and NSFW sub ban - which itself seems to be a manual list of mostly porn subs, as most of the subs that are nsfw as a protest still work so it isn’t a blanket ban.
Reddit is about to turn into an even bigger mess.
Yes, Reddit moving another step closer to Dead-Internet Theory.
There were already bots talking to bots on there. This is about to get worse. I don’t think most people realised how many bots BotDefense was finding and neutralizing.
