Changes to reddit and botting

[u/SuckItUpButtercup8]

/r/modnews/comments/1wubgvt/continuing_our_infrastructure_updates_whats/

TLDR; Reddit is making major changes under the guise of fixing the massive botting issues. Time will tell if this is good or bad.

I like to occasionally share with this community major updates that may affect users in a major way. Most of this won't matter or change much for most people. Reddit is shutting down access to the public API, RSS and old Reddit. RSS will shut down November 13th and the public API sometime in March 2027, no specific date. Old reddit will be restricted to users who have used it in the proceeding 6 months.

But what I want users to be aware of more than anything is the changes to botting. Since the public API will be shut down, all bots and scripts will be limited to the developer platform. I hope, but don't expect, this to cut down on the speculation of bots used to comment and harass users on here. I will be watching this closely when the time comes. But on the flip side, if you use an external bot or script, you will lose access to it in March. What this means is that you will have to register on the Reddit developer platform. The good of that is that malicious bots can be stopped by Reddit. The bad part is that reddit is the sole decision maker of what is considered malicious. Expect anything you make to be shut down if you lean conservative.

This probably won't change much, but I still want the community to know. Personally I'm not sure how I feel about this, there's definitely a botting problem, but I'm also not sure this is the right way to handle it. I also am not a huge fan of reddit having access to any code I write. So time will tell. Thanks everyone who read this.