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Comment by TheAnachronism | Hacker News Reader

It will be business as usual until the change of the APIs. Numerous moderation tools use these APIs and with Reddit shutting them down, many subs will be completely overrun with spam.

/u/spez mentioned in the shitshow that was his AMA, that there would be moderation tools provided by Reddit, but nothing in that direction has ever been shown.

So yes, maybe until the end of June it will be as usual, but afterward many parts of the platform will be unusable with the amount of spam and missing moderation.

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I remember the Reddit side quoting some very low number on third-party moderation tool use… something like 8% of moderators using third party tools.

Maybe that effect is overstated.

I would assume that a small percentage of mods are doing the vast majority of actual moderating. So the interesting statistic would be the percentage of mod actions performed via third-party tools.

This is a bit similar to Stack Overflow claiming only 11% of mods are participating in the strike there. What they didn't say is that it includes almost all of the active Stack Overflow mods and some community-run anti-spam and moderation tools. So the coverage of actual mod activity is far larger than that number might make you think (and the number is of course outdated as well).

I tracked down the original statistic. CEO u/spez wrote:

> About 3% of mod actions come from third-party apps, and we’ve reached out to communities who moderate almost exclusively using these apps to ensure we address their needs.

At this point I wouldn’t trust anything he says also, we’ve heard them say that time and time again with no real/good changes so I have no clue why we’d expect it now.

It’s similar to how the API is limited compared to what the official app can do and lacks many basic features (streaming or callbacks) that are needed to avoid polling it. They’ve said before that if they started charging there would be improvements to the API. Where are they? Are developers supposed to take them on faith/trust? I’m pretty sure Reddit has burned what little of that they have left.

> About 3% of mod actions come from third-party apps, and we’ve reached out to communities who moderate almost exclusively using these apps to ensure we address their needs.

I wouldn't be shocked if that's because third party bots are counted in there, and in terms of sheer scale of spam etc that is 80+ of mod actions.

Huffman has a very good reason to use figures in a misleading way to downplay the impact here.

And how many of these 8% are in the top XX millions user subreddit, how many of the 92% are moderators of the infinite list of < 200 users subreddit ?

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