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.

Do it. I can't wait for it.

in order to crack down on AI unprofitable bots

I'm sure they'll have no issues allowing bots that align with their interests

Spez can eat my ass in hell if he thinks he's getting any more of my info.

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."

So when is this happening, so we can mentally and logistically prepare for the next influx of new users into the fediverse?

Lemmyflation is real

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.

What pisses me off about that statement is that it won't even fix the bots. It's public knowledge that most of the bots on the platform are intentional to maintain the image that the site is super popular still, which means those accounts would just get manually verified and skip the process.

So many redditors will become lemmurs

More seriously the biggest problem with lemmy adoption is that it has less content (even if the quality is better), I don't think every niche has enough people who'll bother to set up equivalent communities here and of course there's a learning curve too, but with some organization they could make the switch

AAA...HaHaHaHaHa!
"Come on. I want you to do it, I want you to do it. Come on, HIT ME!"

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.

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.

ROFL. Man Spez is stupid.

wait wait wait reddit is against AI bots? news to me... https://documentingourdecline.substack.com/p/ai-bots-appeared-after-reddit-partnered

(Why exactly would anyone believe that face ID verification can stop AI bots? Have they seen how well generative AI can generate videos of humans?)

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=24
Hopefully we'll get some more MAU out of this.

Because of the current situation, on Reddit I tend to delete my posts older than about a month and then delete my account at least once a year, and register a new one with a randomly generated username.

It’s not because I’m malicious or intend to spam. It’s because I want to participate and to contribute, but am fearful of being arrested for behavior that is in no way violent, threatening, or dangerous, but which may be politically targeted. I don’t want my posts to make me a target, and I don’t want my posts to be tied together.

I use VPNs and block browser fingerprinting.

Before this, I had three accounts that were more than a decade old(one for personal stuff, one for work, and one for NSFW stuff, to keep everything separate).

But there is NO way in hell that I will use Reddit for even one day if there is a face ID requirement.

If not already, I assume they’ll offer a for-fee API for bots.

I don't care, because reddit, but this makes me wonder if you can just have an AI generate a generic face and feed that in.

It's obviously not about bots. Isn't spez friendly with Peter Thiel?

Okay, I think this is just ragebait. The real quote is:

The most lightweight way is with something like Face ID or Touch ID in the family of technology called passkeys; they actually require human presence.

Which isn't even closely the same as requiring manual ID verification. This is about requiring PassKeys with a special biometric confirmation requirement.

My laptop’s TPM requires a pint of blood to allow booting to an OS. Two pints if it’s Linux.

Why are we using polymarket as a source?!

Maybe we can get more people on the Fediverse lol

This is just a post from Polymarket. The information was taken from another source, they just posted it.

*** Except Reddit and partner owned bots, which will then have no competition for your attention.

Reddit is a pay to play psyop network, nothing more, nothing less.

So the entire point of reddit, the anonymity, is to be thrown out the fucking window lmao

Interesting idea... Is it possible to switch the verification to a bot via a bot. Damn it, when that happens I'll try it out

If they said that about Lemmy i would tell them to fuck off but since it's Reddit who cares most of their user base these days are bots anyway, but jfc are they adamant about age verification, they really want to know where are unsupervised children for their new Epstein Island.

Today everyone throws their principles out the window. Such is the present(

The dead internet isn't a theory on Reddit. It's a reality there. Almost all traffic is

I think they'll announce it. And we'll have time to prepare for the influx of redditors.

Lemme get this straight

foster a website that encourages engagement instead of real human interaction
bots flood the website to farm engagement with months and years-old reposts
obliterate your API support, causing an exodus of users that use 3rd party apps
slowly hemorrhage users while going IPO with your bot site
now mandate id checks so we can weed out the bots that made your IPO look so good

Genius play by Spez. (/s)

It's probably going to be even harder to prevent here because due to federation it's very easy to open multiple accounts across instances and no instance admin has full user data of accounts on other instances...

But it also provides the opportunity to move to instances (and their communities) where the problem is well-managed, if any exist.

Killing off bots and people making new accounts after getting banned would leave basically go one left on Reddit.

Fr

I don't even see a point in commenting on the current version of reddit anymore (and I haven't for a couple of years). You're either replying to bots or about to get into a useless argument with a bad faith actor. I'll gladly comment on reddit alternatives because it's a better experience for me and it's more likely to get other people to make the switch.

Why not start over and create that communities? This was the start of Lemmy, we just copied famous subreddits and do the same stuff over here. Trust me, I was there.

People who make bots will adapt to this more easily than human users will, obviously.

You can't give me gravy and tell me it's Jelly because gravy ain't sweet.

I'd be cautious about seeing that as good news. I'll always be suspicious of how many posts here are either partially or entirely automated, whether that means automatically reposting stuff from other sites, fully generated text, or just augmenting a human's posting.

I like to think we're too small for most botters to care about us, but who knows! As far as I'm aware, no one service has any reliable tools for spotting generated posts. No way are federated services prepared to deal with the insane influx of bots that would naturally come with being significantly more popular. Seems like all we have are captchas...

Pretty sure it dates back to the dawn of commerce.

There's piefed and lemmy and kbin, any of those is good tbh.

Inb4 bots pass this and my face is rejected

Lucky. Mine requires a pound of flesh.

Since when is Polymarket's Twitter account a reliable source of information?

Even my 10 year old account is banned from posting. And I have thousands in karma.

They're doing some other non karma score now, which is probably ML fingerprinting or something.