That's good to see, and I hope reddit starts taking action on more of these bots. There's no good way to filter them out and they make the comments section such a chore to read through.
This bot in particular generates thousands of spam comments. Any popular thread with a video will be filled with requests to download that video. It's even worse than the RemindMe bot. People are too lazy to use an external tool, or even click the "save" button on a post.
Imagine if every second comment on Hacker News was a bot correcting your grammar, converting random measurements into metric, or forming poorly-constructed haikus. It's such a nuisance on the site.
To me, the whole point of a download is that I can preserve access. There's not a "download" link on video posts - "save" just bookmarks it to your internal Reddit bookmarks. If the post gets deleted, you still lose access.
Given that context, I think it's pretty neat that new functionality can be introduced to the site via bots. Unlike a browser extension, this automatically works on Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Edge with no extra development time; and it's significantly more discoverable since you'll see the comments.
If you don't like the feature, you can block that bot with a button click and never see that particular bot again. I use Reddit regularly and block maybe one bot a month?
I'm not a big fan of the grammar bots and such, but "save video" and "remind me" seem like genuinely useful features.
You can use RES and ignore the bots, then you'll never see them. If you don't want to use RES, you could always just block them through reddit and get the same effect. It's not hard.
There's hundreds of bots, and thousands of users who trigger them. You can't possibly block everyone typing /u/SaveVideo, or responding "Good bot/Bad bot" in the comments.
Can RES change comment counts? E.g. I see "post title, 1 comment", click to see what someone said but it's a bot. Blocking (ignoring?) the bot on reddit doesn't change the "1 comment" part.
I don't think it does, but I've never considered it that much of an issue to spend 2 seconds clicking the back button if there are no visible comments. It's not like you know who's posting anyway, so it's always a crapshoot whether it's going to be a bot, relevant comment, or just someone posting something like "+1" or "^^This".
This bot in particular generates thousands of spam comments. Any popular thread with a video will be filled with requests to download that video. It's even worse than the RemindMe bot. People are too lazy to use an external tool, or even click the "save" button on a post.
Imagine if every second comment on Hacker News was a bot correcting your grammar, converting random measurements into metric, or forming poorly-constructed haikus. It's such a nuisance on the site.