Reddit CEO says facial verification may be introduced. Ostensibly to prevent bots.
But we all know how dangerous this can be. But most likely Reddit users will just accept it.
Although they have a great free analogue right under their noses - Lemmy. Which is many times better than its competitor.
I wish more people would discover Lemmy, but that’s unlikely.
There’s no way they want to eliminate bot traffic, it would kill 2/3rds of their traffic instantly. So this just means, “bots that aren’t paying us.”
Reddit, very famously, used bot traffic at its inception to create the illusion of a community big enough to compete with Digg.
It was the OG “fake it till you make it” business.
As the company implements an increasingly draconian “ban every account that looks at me sideways” admin policy, I’m not sure if “2/3rds of the traiffc” isn’t lowballing it. There are entire threads - from initial post to bullshit bottom comment - that get created by bot traffic on the modern site. It’s a full blown hall of mirrors over there.
OG “fake it till you make it” business.
Feels like 99% of “social” network startups. The dead Internet theory started before the LLM craze.
Goes back to email. Easier to create a machine that churns out digital messages than find humans to do the work manually. So you get increasing loads of spam and gibberish, attempting to out-shout one another in a digital space with no bureaucratic regulation or material limits.
That said, one thing that made early social media like Facebook and MySpace and Livejournal appear valuable was the degree of human interaction. What’s more, the interpersonal networks that formed between verified humans gave enormous value to communications across the platform.
Facebook did a pretty good job, early on, of limiting who could join based on authentication through college admin offices. MySpace had a large cohort of real human artists producing real human music, which attracted a real human following. Livejournal predated a lot of advertisement-by-blogging. After the Dot-Com bubble burst, this is where you could see green shoots of economic value in a digital space.
We’ve demolished all that chasing fictitious capital. How valuable it was in practice is debatable, of course. But it’s all gone now.
Tumblr survived botification largely culturally intact
I’ll have to take your word for it
I’m no heritage Tumblr user, I didn’t have an account until about a year ago, but I used to browse the site every now and then. I’d say the current userbase is a joy to be around, but the bots are everywhere. Every comment section on an artist’s post eventually will get a “Are you open for comms?” post. We still get the porn bots funnily enough. Also the occasional account takeovers and then bots DMming people.
But like in terms of real people posting? I don’t even know if I’ve ever had a bot post come up on my feed, for both the following feed and “for you” feed. Plus Tumblr does have an option to look at chronological posts and you can actually reach the end of the page eventually!
We all recently rioted and got the staff to revert a shitty twitter-like update within a day or so, which was nice. I still want wafrn to improve and replace Tumblr so we can escape the PoS CEO, but alas.
I just can’t read it as anything other than warfarin- how’s it supposed to be pronounced?
Take mine too. It’s really funny how tumblr banned porn so all the gooners went to twitter and now tumblr is kinda healthy with a really vocal userbase that WILL backlash at any attempt on enshittifying the platform
The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO, but he’s too busy making everyone distrust Wordpress.
The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO
The ban of every website’s existence.
Pretty sure it dates back to the dawn of commerce.
Indeed, when I read this parent comment I had in mind a snake oil salesman in Lucky Luke (Doc Doxey’s Elixir, volume 38)
The dead internet isn’t a theory on Reddit. It’s a reality there. Almost all traffic is
I read somewhere that it’s estimated that reddit is 90% bots in the comments, and we already know 99% of front page context is from bots accounts.
Exactly this. The bots are coming from inside the house.
That’s not the point of this.
The point of this is to remove unpaid/unauthorized bots. They want their engagement figures to look even better, and they don’t want people offering up their
advertisementspropaganda without paying up.Their goal will never be to eliminate bots because undoubtedly that is something they want to sell access to and use themselves.
By guaranteeing that certain posts are bona fide humans, their data is more valuable to sell for AI data as well… and they probably have a way to dox users with this too.
I think it more means “we want to sell your face data”
I’m a new lemmy user because of this
Welcome! It’s WAY quieter over here because it’s mostly people, not bots.
I’ve been on reddit for 15 years (on and off again, deleting my accounts and then re-signing up later).
I’m looking forward to a fresh start here.
Welcome! It definitely is quieter in ways here, but I find that actually engaging in conversation is better. There’s more real people here.
But this place also has the downfalls that early Reddit and 4chan had. Still better than current Reddit by miles!
I don’t feel like I’m constantly sorting through low quality bot shit to find a human with authentic human expertise.
I do miss the long chains of wordplay, the sense of humor and fun. But Reddit gave that up for ragebait ages ago.
Welcome aboard! Lots of new people, nice for the fediverse. I should probs donate to the project too, that helps…
This
Welcome to the free side of the internet
Samsies
Welcome! Hope you find and enjoy your space here
Im sure the website that sold userdata to every single AI company to train their models on wouldn’t ever even think of selling the faces of every one of its users to a company to train its AI face generator on.
Or that the website which accidentally admitted “the most reddit addicted city” is an air force base that hosts their online counterintelligence teams… Where was I going with this? Hmm must be nothing.
selling the faces of every one of its users to a company to train its AI face generator on
Okay, but wouldn’t it be kind of funny if every AI face generator suddenly started producing faces that look like Redditors?
Why does every generated face have a neckbeard and fedora?
I mean they already put Epstein and Kirk in there…
Social platforms are just data sources anyway. This is just another way of enriching the data.
I love the conspiracy theory that it’s Elgin Air Force Base, aka Area 51 version 2 .
Does it still count as a conspiracy theory if it’s objectively true? Hahaha (oh god)
I made the switch to Lemmy today, feels old school kind of good.
Reddit is not only allowing for bots to run rampant, but also it’s managed by the Epstein class and their supporters.
You made the right choice by coming here.
Welcome! You’ll fit right in
welcome, reddit refugees.
Thank you. This is why I’m here.
Ditto!
Well that and they permabanned my 14 year old, 1million karma account for making a post that insinuated Donald is a pedophile that some MAGA got all upset about and they rejected my appeal.
So…fuck em.
Mine was for suggesting Biden drone strike SCOTUS justices immediately after they ruled that the president is effectively above the law. I wasn’t advocating for Biden to do anything illegal! 🤣
Well that depends. Were you suggesting that he do that officially or unofficially?
I had a similar account that got banned for connecting to the wrong VPN endpoint. Clicked a random server from my VPN provider, suddenly my account was permanently banned with no ability to appeal
Thinking it was just some issue on my end (it was a non-standard looking ban), I logged into another OG account of mine, which also promptly got perma-banned
Extreme incompetence for them to be issuing perma-bans like that based on IP address
I stand with your 14 year old. Same thing happened to me (well, very similar, my message was more in that clot has just one job category).
Welcome aboard!
Steve, ain’t we glad to have ya! Welcome :)
Good, next step is installing Artix :3
Funny way to spell Arch
/s
I don’t use Arch, btw
I just moved to CachyOS when I learned about Artix. The distro hopping never truly ends, does it? LOL.
Thanks for the welcome
– again. lol
The real problem was third party clients I swear
So glad I ditched reddit.
Yep, same!
So glad I was banned from Reddit.
BREAKING NEWS! Reddit figured out how to make their platform even shittier
I mean, requiring FaceID is a horrible idea, but there maybe might be a better alternative (I’m talking about the general idea of a “proof of humanity” online, not specifically using this solution).
The fact of the matter is that bots are a massive issue online. When russia got sanctioned and cut off from the western Internet, r/Conservative went radio silent for a couple of days - until they figured out how to VPN through the Netherlands. There are whole communities where bots discuss bot-posted content. And I have no doubt in my mind that it will also happen on Lemmy as soon as there’s even a hint of profit* to be found.
* “profit” not as in “monetary gain”, but as “any kind of gain, be it money, influence, propaganda, chaos”, etc., etc.
Every so often r/conservative traffic dies down and the subreddit turns much more centrist. It’s never liberal by any stretch but you’ll actually see lots of criticism poke through. Same thing happens with r/politics occasionally. Reddit is just astroturfed so heavily that there isn’t a point to it anymore. You have worse than a coinflips odds on replying to an actual human.
Worldcoin requires you to use their Orb device to sign up, and you can buy a verified account for $20.
There are alternatives we could use.
A bunch of European countries already have “e-IDs” that can share very limited data with a service provider. For instance, Sweden has “Bank ID” (ID generated by you bank), which you can use to, for example, sign in to your housing association’s website. This gives them your name and registered address, immediately giving you the site for your particular community.
You could use a system like that to send only the “this is a human” token. Potentially also “this is an adult”, without giving away any of your personal details, including your date of birth.
Why not use the bots to build bot detectors or categorize places online that are heavily botted, look for patterns and collect data for others to research.
Because they don’t actually want to do that. Having open platforms means actual conversation happens and that’s poison to authoritarians.
It’s a LOT easier to make bots fake being human than it is to detect bots faking being human.
So a computer can’t ever truly generate a random number but it can generate total random dialogue.
I think we just didn’t make an effort to catalog and look hard enough to identify these patterns.
I feel like if we started to truly look at the most obvious place we could see a lot of things that can be used to identify.
Think of it this way: there are billions of types of online interactions where detection is either impossible (an image or link post) or extremely difficult (general conversation where sometimes even humans don’t sound like humans due to slang/education/etc).
Not only that, you’d end up with a “tug of war” where the existence of such detectors would power the improvement of the bots, which would require the improvement of the detector (which is always more difficult).
And the other option is an anonymous token that defines you as a human user. Which is simpler and cheaper to implement?
I think you’re wrong. Completely wrong. There are billions of messages but any intelligent person knows you don’t go through each one by one.
Do you ever see those guys who can look at a picture of a tree in a field and identify where it is in the world. There’s billions of trees. How do they do that with precision?
Classification.
They can train their bots on whatever they want. The human is smarter. If they tune them, you use the methods and knowledge learned and adapt. Like generating random numbers, there’s limits almost always. You don’t find them by inaction.
4chan a website full of racist, neo nazi and pedophiles were just goofing around and they do insane OSNIT research. Lemmy is fucking around with beans and moths. I don’t know. I’m just saddened by the state of things and how much better everybody else is at things I always thought the left was good at. It’s just been eye opening to see.
“the left” is not a monolith. A lot of people have various relationships with"the left". I don’t identify with “the left” much because I disagree, strongly, with being put in a groupthink box. I happen to have some beliefs that the groupthink box on the left has vhemently and painfully attacked me for. But I also REALL REALLY REALLY think the right is wildly wrong, because they’re being simplistic, stupid, and very very corrupt. And I STRONGLY object to corruption. I happen to genuinely and unironically love my country and the promise of a fair chance for all. I love clean water. Clean air. A healthy wilderness ecosystem you can spend time in. Hard work that does good for the world. I love the freedom to research, honestly, and speak freely and without fear.
I don’t see the right sharing some key parts of those values these days. But I’m concerned the left has become too inactive, too sullen, too much a party of victims who lash out reactively.
Don’t have a solution yet except to vote.
The human is smarter
So, you want to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators? The human is smarter, yeah, but not the bot doing the detection.
If they tune them, you use the methods and knowledge learned and adapt
You say it like “tuning them” is a magic trick, where they wave their hands a couple of times, and now the detection algorithms are smarter than the bots writing the comments. SOMEONE has to go in, and figure out the maths to make the detection algorithms smarter and better at detecting. That takes time and resources.
You’re also forgetting that “tuning them” works both ways. The people writing the shit-post bots also work on improving their tools, to make them indistinguishable from human posts.
Also: how can you tall that “lol, kys noob” is written by a human, or by a bot? The vast majority of comments online are these short shit-comments.
I’m just saddened by the state of things and how much better everybody else is at things I always thought the left was good at
- 4chan is not “magically” “good” at “OSINT”. They fuck up a lot of things too. It just so happens that what they’re most famous for required one dude who wrote a script, a bunch of kids with bandwidth to spare.
- Their OSINT is super iffy, hit-and-miss. Much like Reddit’s. Or any other large enough community’s.
- What @AnotherUsername@lemmy.ml said.
More lowkey polymarket advertisements.
Why is it the only place I see polymarket is on Lemmy screenshots?
I’m so used to ignoring who tweets are from that I didn’t notice till you mentioned it and scrolled back up, lol
As someone with a problematic relationship with alcohol, from a family of the same, i get addiction, but I don’t get gambling. The way it’s become normalized by society is so weird to me.
They made it easier for bots to thrive by allowing hidden post histories, limiting the API, and punishing users for “bad” reports, but claim they need face ID to filter out bots?
They need to filter out unauthorised bots. There’ll still be a fuckton but they’ll be spreading the right propaganda.
Reddit should crack down on human users instead! Let Reddit be AI Bot Exclusive space!
Reddit is no longer for humans. So yes, the situation is pretty dire.
and yet tech bros scrape it for model training and content research. i used to like AskPhilosophy and the likes back when it wasn’t wackjob agora for clinically insane (a decade ago in not more?) but seeing that shit getting mined is baffling because it is basically a deliberate data contamination.
Yea I prefer to get my Reddit news from a gambling site that facilitates bets on human lives.
how many of us noped the fuck outa there when they tried to force their garbage app on us…? this will only hasten it’s demise.
RedReader still works (for now) - and it’s magnificent.
Fuck /u/spez
