From the article:
A volunteer-made project that fights bots on Reddit is shutting down. BotDefense, a tool that helps fight bots in more than 3,600 subreddits and has nearly 150,000 accounts on its bans list, will be going away.
As for why: The community of users and moderators submitting accounts to us depend on Pushshift, the API, and third-party apps. And we would be deluding ourselves if we believed any assurances from Reddit given the track record of broken promises. Investing further resources into Reddit as a platform presents significant risks, and it’s safer to allocate one’s time, energy, and passions elsewhere.
The worse was the disingenuous removal of the Pushshift API. Framing it like devs have been using that API for things they didn’t envision (like unddit using it to retrieve deleted comments so you could see if an admin deleted a genuine comment or if it was just hate speech)
Terrible situation overall.