zlacker

I've only moderated small subreddits and even I know the chaos that results from not having bot-driven subreddit management tools. You may hate Automoderator when it deletes your carefully crafted post for whatever reason, but I guarantee you will hate Reddit itself when your favorite subs become overrun with illegal and off-topic spam.

The race will be between Reddit admins recognizing the degradation of the user experience and the outflow of users who don't want to visit their favorite subreddit because they keep seeing decapitated heads and underage pornography and every conversation is off topic.

>>bshipp+(OP)
This is really tangential to the core issue of charging for API access, as it’s essentially just an implementation detail. Losing moderation functionality is a valid complaint, but Reddit doesn’t need a free API for that to exist. There’s no reason to think that the required functionality won’t be implemented into the service. Your complaint here is also, rather obviously, massively overblown. The free API never enabled a moderation tool that automatically detected and removed gore or child porn, so there’s really no reason to think your claims about that content have any credibility.

>>Americ+L3
> the free API never enabled a moderation tool that automatically detected and removed gore or child porn

I have no idea what subreddits are using these days, but I'm familiar with spambot, that compared any submitted image against blacklists. For anyone managing a NSFW subreddit, such a tool is an absolute necessity to avoid getting sent to the penalty box by Reddit admins.

https://github.com/4pr0n/spambot

I don't know what's being used now, but when I was familiar with it, spambot was monitoring dozens of NSFW subreddits that had tens of thousands of subscribers. This is only one of thousands of such customized moderation bots that use the free API.