From the article:
A volunteer-made project that fights bots on Reddit is shutting down. BotDefense, a tool that helps fight bots in more than 3,600 subreddits and has nearly 150,000 accounts on its bans list, will be going away.
As for why: The community of users and moderators submitting accounts to us depend on Pushshift, the API, and third-party apps. And we would be deluding ourselves if we believed any assurances from Reddit given the track record of broken promises. Investing further resources into Reddit as a platform presents significant risks, and it’s safer to allocate one’s time, energy, and passions elsewhere.
I actually participated in this from time to time. It was sometimes fun to spend a few hours creeping through bot profiles and building a network of them and reporting them all.
Hey, I hope you don’t mind me asking a question.
Given that upvotes and downvotes are public on Lemmy, do you think it would be possible to use that info to potentially detect bots or vote manipulation?
Yeah, I’d imagine it’s possible to identify the behaviour that some bots followed on Reddit. It also does help that global karma isn’t a thing since it was a big part of the incentive that led to bots in the first place. I don’t know if you ever encountered the subreddit “FreeKarma4u” but it was basically just a sub with no rules that allowed bots to upvote each other’s posts and comments until they met the karma threshold to start posting on other subs.