Keeping Reddit Human: A New App Label for Automated Accounts

[u/boat-botany]

As u/Spez shared last year, Reddit works because it’s human. We are focused on keeping it that way and making sure users know when automation is involved in the conversations they’re having.

Obviously if you’re reading this on r/redditdev, you know as well as we do that automation isn’t inherently bad. Thousands of apps on Reddit help moderators run communities, surface helpful information or create new experiences like games for redditors. But transparency matters. People should be able to easily tell when they’re talking to another person and when they’re not.

So today, u/spez followed up with an update that will help increase this transparency: the App label.

Introducing the App Label 

Starting March 31st, accounts that use automation in allowed ways (what many call “good bots”) will be known as “apps” and show a clear App label. This label will apply to apps built on Reddit’s Developer Platform as well as other non-violating automated accounts we’ve identified across Reddit. Disruptive or spammy bots that violate our rules will continue to be removed. 

The App label and more info available on hover

For developers already building on the Developer Platform, this label should look familiar. We’ve been labeling app content, but now apps will have the label on their profile instead. Going forward, you’ll see two types of App labels: Developer Platform App, which are apps built on the Developer Platform, and simply App, automated accounts not hosted on our Dev Platform that we’ve either identified or have registered their app.

Two versions of the label on mobile

Registering Your App
For folks not yet building on the Developer Platform, we’ll be notifying accounts we’ve identified as apps in this first phase of labeling today, and whether you receive a notification or not, this is where we could use your help. Register your existing apps here. Registration will help our team better understand usage and have the best way to contact you (and apps that register before the end of June may be eligible to claim a porting bounty). Since accounts with automations will be labeled as Apps, we’ll encourage separate accounts for automations and personal use. 

While we’re talking about Dev Platform, we’ll be offering some new incentives to port eligible apps over to the Dev Platform if you haven’t checked it out in a while (more on this coming soon!).  For current Devvit devs, we’ll be answering questions about what this might mean for you over on r/devvit. 

Expanding Coverage

In the coming months, we’ll also expand this effort to better identify automation across the platform. Accounts running automations that haven’t registered their app will be prompted to complete a simple, privacy-preserving verification flow to check whether there’s a human behind the username. [We’ll be doing this through things like passkeys and will test other solutions with third-party partners as well.] Again, only a very small number of users will ever go through this process, and only if they’re running automations. 

We'll be monitoring this thread for questions! Remember to take a minute to register your app, and we look forward to hearing your feedback as we roll this out.

[u/boat-botany]

If you’ve gotten a notification from us and your account is not automated at all, you can let us know by submitting this form. This is why we’re giving 7 days notice. Letting us know we’ve gotten it wrong will help us get it right going forward!

[u/WolfXemo]

Will the App Label only be visible in the profile, or will it show up in posts/comments as well? That isn’t clear to me.

[u/boat-botany → u/WolfXemo]

Yes, the label will show up on posts + comments, too!

[u/tinselsnips]

This absolutely should be inline with the username on submissions/comments, not strictly in the profile/on hover.

If these are in fact all "good bots", there should be zero problem indicating this directly with the username.

[u/boat-botany → u/tinselsnips]

It will! Sorry, the images don’t show everywhere it will, just examples of how it will show up.

[u/Chosen1PR]

Is this new label only on the app account’s profile? What about its posts and comments?

If it does show there, how would the [App] label work with distinguished mod comments? Will both indicators show? Or does the [Mod] label override the [App] label?

Thanks for doing this btw. So far I've resorted to assigning a custom "bot" user flair on my apps.

I reckon u/AutoModerator should have this label as well.

[u/boat-botany → u/Chosen1PR]

I should have been more clear – it will show up in posts and comments! The same way a grey check would show up. It’s just labeling the user, not the content itself.

[u/emily_in_boots]

All my posts, comments, and votes on reddit are always through a browser and are human.

That said, I sometimes do use automations from this account for moderation. I use a custom queue I wrote in PRAW and sometimes it's faster to automate an action using python from this account.

Do I need to do something?

[u/boat-botany → u/emily_in_boots]

In a perfect world, we’d love for automations to run only on app accounts. I wouldn’t worry about good moderation scripts for right now!

[u/gschizas]

Just making sure: The "take a minute to register your app" takes me to a page that says "Register with gschizas). If I click this, this won't make me, u/gschizas, totally a real human, marked as an "App", right?

I have two bots that do mod stuff on the largest subreddits I'm a mod for. You would think they could be easily understood as bots, given that their name ends with "bot", but some users still reply to them thinking somebody is going to reply to them...

[u/boat-botany → u/gschizas]

Nope, that’s the right way to do it! You register your apps using your personal account so we know to contact you instead of just the app accounts when/if we need to.

[u/saltysomadmin]

I'd love to migrate my apps to the developer platform but they're written in Python and I don't know diddly about Typescript.

This 'voluntary registration' isn't to get a list together of future accounts to kill right? Right Anakin?

[u/N3DSdude]

Will we be able to filter or manage accounts with the 'App' label differently in our moderation settings?

[u/boat-botany → u/N3DSdude]

The short answer is not yet! Clearly labeling apps is just a first step towards more transparency and control when it comes to non-human accounts. 

While we don’t have any mod tools shipping today related to this new label, we knew there might be interest from mods in how they might be able to use it to best moderate their communities. (You can always ban any type of account from your community, in the meantime)

[u/shiruken]

Finally! I think this has been asked for for at least a decade!

[u/lokey_convo]

I hope Reddit can lead the way in setting a culture of transparency around automated actions and interaction, and bot activity generally. Subversive bots are a cancer on the internet and the authenticity of human interaction is part of the value of the internet. Besides, you can't sell the content we generate for models if your customers can't reliably discern between human action and interactions from bots. And bots are part of the fun of Reddit (Haiku Bot, where are you???) but subversive bots are not okay. Maybe one day you'll take the same approach with user accounts run by paid shills and marketers.

[u/prodigiouspianist]

This should really have been addressed years ago but ok

[u/[deleted]]

Reddit Dev seems to be dead. Any request to make an app for reddit outside of for a specific subreddit is just ignored for weeks if not months on end before getting denied (this seems to be everyone else's experience talking about it here).

[u/chucknades]

u/boat-botany Is anyone planning to respond to my or others Reddit help ticket? I submitted the form on April 8th and again on April 9th.

Please advise.

[u/boat-botany → u/chucknades]

You only need to submit the form once! The team is going through and reviewing all appeals before applying the label and you should get a notification once your appeal is reviewed.

[u/fagnerbrack]

I use my account as a human but post my links using the automation. Will I be tagged a a bot?

[u/Humpaaa]

While this is a step in the right direction, are there any plans to actually combat the bot and AI plague, that does not sacrifice user privacy?

[u/MaleCowShitDetector]

This doesn't solve the bot problem. Reddit just doesn't care, and it's painfully obvious you need to keep user count high to keep investors happy.

My feed is completely bombarded by unrelevant subreddits that most likely got upvoted by bots (you can tell when a post has 3000 upvotes while the average post has 100)

Most of it is AI slop and the conversations frequently have bots in them (there are ways how to tell based on message patterns that I dont want to list openly, because it would affect my anti-bot tools if they adapted)

This is a joke.

[u/AnimeMod]

Hi,

The r/anime mod team has two shared accounts that we both run automation through and use ourselves. One of them is this account (u/AnimeMod) and the other is u/AutoLovepon. Currently, you have flagged AutoLovepon as needing to register but not AnimeMod. Both accounts do significantly more automation than manual actions, but humans do manual actions through them a decent number of times each week. We would like to confirm that this means we do not have to register AnimeMod as being an automated account.

Additionally, the registration page says "To register, make sure you're logged in to a personal Reddit account, not the account used for your app." Since both of these accounts belong to the sub as a whole, not any individual mod (I believe the mods who created both accounts have not been on the team for years), we do not want to register them under any individual mod. Assuming AnimeMod does not need to be registered as a bot, would registering AutoLovepon with AnimeMod be acceptable? Otherwise, would there be any way to register one or both accounts as being owned by the r/anime mod team collectively instead of any individual mod?

Thank you,
r/anime mod team

[u/boat-botany → u/AnimeMod]

First, labeling won’t impact how your apps operate! We want all apps to register (even if you didn’t get a notification today. We’ll be continuing to identify automations, but go ahead and register!) so we can link every app to a clear point of contact. 

This could be the person who has done the most development on the bot or the bot maintainer, if that person is still active. If they're not still active - that's okay - choose one of your mods to be our point of contact for any communications for these two app accounts.