Reddit reposting bot
Note: this post about the Reddit reposting bot has nothing to do with the Nintendo 64. It’s just something that I wanted to publish. Originally posted on 27 Jul 2020.
In my day-to-day, I don’t really work with Python, but it does seem to be the hot programming language nowadays. So to get some practice, I worked on this simple solution to a problem I came across a few months ago. I made a Reddit reposting bot that takes posts from one subreddit and reposts them in another, essentially making a clone of it.
You can get it from this Gitlab link and follow the instructions on how to install it from the readme file.
Why is the Reddit reposting bot needed?
The reason for making the bot is to curb moderator tyranny and awful communities. Consider this situation: There’s a subreddit that you like. It has a great topic, fun posts… everyone is having a great time.
But then restrictions come along. There could be a variety of reasons, the mods could go rogue, the community hits the mainstream, admins start making demands or it could just be that the sub’s topic is neutral but the community is heavily biased. As a user you don’t really have a say in how it is run, but you can decide to move out and make your own.
The problem is, nobody wants to visit an empty sub. If there’s no content, what’s the point? That’s where this bot comes in. It allows you to import the posts from the source sub to give users all the content they need so that they don’t feel they’re missing out.
A short bit of history
I’m not going to name the subs I made this for, but let’s just say there was a sort of ‘cringe’ sub where people would laugh at how ridiculous some people would act. Now, the mods for that forum were incredibly politically biased and would ban you at the drop of a hat if you even suggest that you disagree with any of their tenets.
Both subs eventually got banned by the admins, likely as part of their purge a month ago to clean the site of anything that might put the site in a bad light in the eyes of investors and adverisers. So this bot will not protect you from oversealous admins, but it will allow you to overcome overzealous mods.
Limitations
The bot does detect NSFW content and reposts it as such. I haven’t tested it with fully SFW or NSFW subs so I can’t really say how it would behave.
There isn’t any sort of word or user filter, so the bot will also copy over spam and illegal content, so make sure that the sub is moderated. You can probably add some kind of filters by using automoderator.
Final comments (rant)
The main reason why I’m making this public is because I’ve sort of given up on Reddit ever being a decent place for censorship-free discussion. Banning communities almost never happened, but they’ll keep on moving the goalposts on their T&Cs until nothing is left but /r/aww.
The reason why the admins keep on doing it is because they’re spineless. It’s easy to tell that they only ever ban subs when they start getting bad press about it, or because they want to preemptively avoid it. Or if they’re trying to ride on the coattails of a current event.
There’s only a handful of places left that are worth visiting that aren’t part of the hive mind or inane. Even a sub like /r/n64 is pretty much just “I got this game!” or “My collection (of the same 12 games that everyone has)” and it gets hundreds of upvotes.
It’s just become completely bland. Saturated with overbearing mods and their arbitrary rules, karmawhoring content that is filled with more air than a bag of chips and an administration team that is desperately trying to make it into the next Facebook.
The sad thing is, it almost is like Facebook. Minus actually making money.
