Like many anti-abuse projects on Reddit, we’ve done all of this for free while putting up with Reddit’s penchant for springing detrimental changes on developers and moderators (e.g., adding API limits without advance notice and blocking Pushshift) and figuring out workarounds for numerous scalability issues that Reddit never seems to fix. Without Pushshift, the number of malicious bots we were able to ban dropped to 5,517 in May.
The “blocking Pushift” part is what actively makes their work harder by a lot.
Bots on Reddit for example did farm karma to later sell those accounts (more karma makes accounts look more legit) or circumnavigate karma thresholds to spam. There is no karma here so that’s (hopefully) not going to become a thing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BotDefense/comments/14riw76/botdefense_is_wrapping_up_operations/
The “blocking Pushift” part is what actively makes their work harder by a lot.