Reddit Teases Developer Platform Beta to Simplify Bot Creation

Reddit is prepping a developer platform that will let users “build meaningful Reddit extensions” and bots that automate functions across the site.

The service opened up a waitlist for those interested in the Reddit Developer Platform; sign up here(Opens in a new window) and Reddit will contact you when the beta opens. “The Developer Platform team is focused on creating offerings that improve support, flexibility, and performance for our third-party developers,” the Reddit product and design team wrote in a blog post(Opens in a new window).

Frequent Redditors have most certainly come across at least one bot. On the site, they make the browsing experience more streamlined and, in certain cases, safer. U/AutoModerator(Opens in a new window), for example, is a tool that manages user posts based on criteria set by subreddits moderators. While u/AutoModerator is limited in its scope, it handles many of the trivial tasks that would overwhelm a small team managing a group of thousands of users.

“Currently, third-party developers on Reddit operate primarily as siloed resources for the communities they care about, utilizing limited resources and ad-hoc support. The Reddit Developer Platform will change all this,” Reddit said.

Reddit highlighted a few existing tools, like u/tweet_poster(Opens in a new window), which identifies Twitter links and posts the contents of said tweet, and u/RemindMeBot(Opens in a new window), which lets commenters set alarms with custom deadlines and sends reminders. There are also bots used in niche subreddits to handle different tasks like u/Stabbot(Opens in a new window), which analyzes videos posted to Reddit and leaves a comment with a version of the video that’s been stabilized using software.