Even if subreddits don't go dark, the impact will be rapidly observable in August as moderation becomes extremely difficult and subreddit support bots that eliminate spam and maintain post quality stop working.
>the impact will be rapidly observable in August as moderation becomes extremely difficult
Is there a market out there where I can bet all my money against this claim? The idea that this will lead to a spam wave destroying Reddit is wishful thinking on the part of aggrieved moderators who see themselves as forming a Thin Blue Line against a tide of chaos.
I'm not an aggrieved moderator, but I am someone who has moderated in the past and used the third-party tools and bots that allowed a subreddit to remain focused on a specific topic. I don't think you recognize how much random spam and troll submissions are caught by filters and cleaned up automatically in even small subreddits.
Having given up moderation ages ago, I have no dog in this fight. I'm sitting on the sidelines watching the drama with a bowl of popcorn, just like everyone else.
Well, there will still be some anti-spam tools, right?
If there's a detailed argument saying that basic moderation (eg. obvious spam removal and not "I want to ban everyone who's ever said anything nice about Trump") will take say an order of magnitude more human effort without 3rd party tools I'd be curious to see it. If there's a persuasive claim along these lines I'd shift my beliefs, but I haven't seen it so far.
For sure, and I haven't moderated in a few years so perhaps the internal reddit tools have improved since I last used them. They used to be pretty basic and cruddy. The moderation team I was a part of relied pretty heavily on the moderator toolbox:
I don't know if the proposed API changes will affect this specific tool, but I doubt moderators would be nearly as up in arms if their tools were going to keep working the way they had in the past.
