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.
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
Thank you! I’ve had the pleasure to notice Lemmy (or this particular instance) is more of an open thinker space, and that’s great to see. It really reminds me of the Internet before the corpos got their hands to squeeze every penny out of the average netizen.
Nice ! Fuck that rats nest !
BREAKING NEWS! Reddit figured out how to make their platform even shittier
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
Samsies
Welcome to the free side of the internet
Welcome! Hope you find and enjoy your space here
Watch /r/politics posts go from 22k upvotes to 3k upvotes overnight.
This data surely goes straight to Palentir
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.
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.
If not already, I assume they’ll offer a for-fee API for bots.
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 mean it’s also trivially easy for ai to make a photorealistic image of a human, i dont see how this could possibly ever work. Whatever test they apply would be almost by definition cheatable by AI.
JUST IN: Reddit CEO says company is considering requiring all bots on the platform to click on ads in order to drive revenue to Reddit.
So glad I ditched reddit.
Yep, same!
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.
never been happier to have been banned for no reason at all
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
Welcome aboard!
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).
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.
It ends with LFS >:3
Do they have a T2 distribution for Macs?
I was making a rather annoying joke. LFS might work on with Asahi’s bootloading, but then you are dealing with Linux From Scratch which could only ever make sense to any degree with Nix
– again. lol
Thanks for the welcome
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?
I mean they already put Epstein and Kirk in there…
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)
Social platforms are just data sources anyway. This is just another way of enriching the data.
The real problem was third party clients I swear
You have to pick a server.
I promise you, that’s why
You’re probably right and this is the first time I’ve felt kind of glad for the “speed bump” that picking a server on the fediverse has become. We’ll get another influx before too long; maybe a “you need to be this clever to ride the ride” checkpoint isn’t such a bad thing.
That’s what I thought when I initially signed up but I’m realizing we lack diversity baaaaaaad. I’d wager 90%+ of users are tech people and we are infamously antisocial, which is rough for a “social media”
Selecting a server wasn’t an issue for me. The RIF app told me to go to .world and I quickly decided it was the right instance for me to start.
I moreso had to adjust to the slower pace and less engagement on Lemmy compared to reddit, the lack of niche communities, my favorite subs not having a perfect equivalent here.
I was super pissed off with reddit and am still salty, so my anger committed me to making the commitment to Lemmy. I was addicted to reddit and they took away the app I was using for over 10 years. I wasn’t ready for the breakup and was scorned. I was highly motivated to make Lemmy work for me.
Users need that level of anger and outrage to motivate them.
Oh no, how am I going to pick a server?! That’s even harder than choosing a shirt to put on!
It’s weird, but that shit intimidates non technical people, and there are a lot of them. It would need better if it says something like ‘Click on the flag of the country closest to where you live’ or something like that.
Linux seems to have managed to do this - I recently did I mint install on my laptop, it was all GUI, no arcane jargon, no need to use the console, really well optimised for the non-technical folk. You’d be surprised how many people see ‘server’ and think ‘I don’t have one of those, and I don’t think I want one’.
Is there a reason to expect bots won’t overwhelm Lemmy as well?
Most likely, they will. They are not elikely to infect larger instances. Smaller instances will spot them and ban them, I hope.
Why do you expect they will be unlikely to infect larger instances?
They will still infect them but they will be more obvious.
An unusual comment, you don’t know it’s a bot.
Hundreds of unusual comments and doesn’t engage with the local community. It’s a bot.
It’s partly why online discourse is toxic. There is a disconnect with th real world and online and no social stigma. On a small community instances there is.
The problem though, will be trying to manage which isntances need to be blocked as they are rampant with bota. If the fediverse grows and there are lots of smaller communities,.it will be harder to keep track. Currently it’s small and most instances with active users are familiar.
This is the real question here. Especially with advanced AI, it might be difficult to spot bot accounts.
I (mildly) am concerned about that also…but bear in mind…the difference between Lemmy and Reddit is you can…defederate…from known bad instances. If Lemmy goes in that direction - and we undertake the idea I mentioned here - https://lemmy.world/post/44633911/22828600
then we can basically recreate a blacklist / whitelist (ala AdBlock). Instance-wide crawlers can still scrape public data, but that’s an ActivityPub protocol constraint, not a Lemmy failure.
Instance crawling with bots? Sorry, no soup for you.
Spam bots on bad instances? Blocked from your feed.
Peak “fine, I’ll do it myself” energy? Yes. But if you’re reading this, you’re 1) part of the resistance (lol) and (2) already here, so …
Not nearly as much financial incentive for the admins to look the other way
Because Lemmings can be insufferable sometimes.
Have you considered changing instances?
I just block people. That’s much more effective.
As opposed to Reddit users?
Yes. There’s much more grand standing.
Well yea but it’s because we’re right 👍
It still is more populated and has a lot higher activity, which suits slightly better for doomscrolling.
Lemmy needs to get slightly more popular. And maybe a centralized place to find different instances?
Like i haven’t found any active fitness related ones.It’s like coming from a convention Hall full of people and going into a minimally occupied hotel.
Centralisation of power is in the first place why we moved away from Reddit. Fuck that.
You can find your own fitness sidelemmy. There are actually a few I found.
Completely fair, just the difference and lack of constant flow of content is going to put off many people and without a significant enough drive there’s no point to get used to the new environment.
Mind pointing me in a the right direction?
/r/rats and tv show discussions for me
This is basically all I use for now. Lemmy doesn’t have the infrastructure for every TV episode and movie I watch.
yeah. and even in the generic tv show communities there are maybe a couple people discussing a new episode, if at all.
Compared to thousands for a popular show.
heck, even star trek is barely active compared to reddit. and they did an official migration in the beginning
If the massive waves of permabans they have been doing for anti-trumpers weren’t enough, this should kill the website entirely.
Something something China owns Reddit, something something Trump pissed of China, something something oblique humor here.
Am I doing it right?
[This is a meta-commentary on why I left reddit, thank you for participating]
Simultaneously China owns Reddit so they control everything there for the see see pee, but somehow they don’t censor that criticism
What? Reddit is left-leaning, why would they ban Anti-Trumpers
Reddit is owned by right wing extremists. Any mention of something negative towards their king, perma-banned for “inciting violence”
funny cause nazis and pedophiles on reddit don’t get banned.
I used to assume most of the bots belonged to Reddit. I still do, too.
Those won’t require id
Of course they are
