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.
It would be lovely if these groups could be convinced to move to the fediverse. There's a large set of problems like this that we don't have the tooling to handle yet, and it'd be a shame if all the knowledge on how to deal with stuff like bots and brigading died with reddit.