For those who came in late Reddit’s managers have been trying to make the site more profitable as it heads towards going public. The only problem with that it has been demanding huge amounts of cash from developers who offer their products cheaply to users.

This has resulted in strikes with many admins making their subreddits going dark. The latest group to announce its departure is BotDefense which helps remove rogue submission and comment bots from Reddit and which is maintained by volunteer moderators.

BotDefense's creator told Ars Technica that the team is now quitting over Reddit's "antagonistic actions" toward moderators and developers, with concerning implications for spam moderation on some large subreddits like r/space.

BotDefense started in 2019 as a volunteer project and has been run by volunteer mods, known as "dequeued" and "abrownn" on Reddit. Since then, it claims to have populated its ban list with 144,926 accounts, and it helps moderate subreddits with huge followings, like r/gaming (37.4 million members), /r/aww (34.2 million), r/music (32.4 million), r/Jokes (26.2 million), r/space (23.5 million), and /r/LifeProTips (22.2 million). Dequeued told Ars that other large subreddits BotDefense helps moderates include /r/food, /r/EarthPorn, /r/DIY, and /r/mildlyinteresting. On Wednesday, dequeued announced that BotDefense is ceasing operations. BotDefense has already stopped accepting bot account submissions and will disable future action on bots. BotDefense "will continue to review appeals and process unbans for a minimum of 90 days or until Reddit breaks the code running BotDefense," the announcement said.

Dequeued said there were plans for future tools, like a new machine learning system for detecting "many more" bots. Before the API battle turned ugly, dequeued had no plans to stop working on BotDefense.

Subreddits that have relied on BotDefense are uncertain about managing their subreddits without the tool, and the tool's impending departure is new signs of a deteriorating Reddit community.