Reddit mods fear spam overload as BotDefense leaves “antagonistic” Reddit
arstechnica.com
Mod-made tool claims to have banned 144,926 spambot accounts.

Title says it all. If you think Reddit’s been trending down lately, just wait.

  • zurohki@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    they do understand that the APIcalypse will make their financial figures look great

    That would require people to actually pay that API pricing. The apps closing down and AI people scraping the web site instead won’t help them.

    • Paralda@programming.devEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      Also, AI only really needs to scrape a post once. I don’t think there will be much financial gain from openai or someone else scraping reddit

      • awderon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        They don’t even need to scrape it. There is a torrent out there with all the data for the last 10 years or so neatly packaged.

    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      Ahh, but it’s a bit more subtle than that.

      The API pricing was a tool to kill the apps, because Reddit is not able to milk ad money from those users. Now that most of the 3rd party apps are dead and most subs are open, users have no choice but to be exposed to adds. That’s where the real money is.

      • zurohki@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, but Reddit makes pennies per user from showing them ads, so they’re still losing money.

        Rather than laughing all the way to the bank, it’s more of a forced chuckle on the way to the dole office.