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
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.
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?
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.
How can you tell? Not attacking, just curious. I never could tell, well maybe if usernames are all oddly similarly patterned, and even than, I can’t be sure it’s not some app/program that hands out those ids when you register in it, as people sometimes can be too lazy to come up with a meaningful username. Short comments can also be made by dumb humans, long posts can be written by modern Artificial Idiot. 20 years ago, I could tell spam post, cause they all were literally either identical to each other, or at least totally ignored context and never responded to questions. Now I am not sure at all. Definitely some people are less eloquent than AI.
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 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.
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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?
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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).
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
Good, next step is installing Artix :3
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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
Steve, ain’t we glad to have ya! Welcome :)
– again. lol
Thanks for the welcome
So the entire point of reddit, the anonymity, is to be thrown out the fucking window lmao
Today everyone throws their principles out the window. Such is the present(
spez is a frigging billionaire. What other principle than making money could possibly have guided him to this point?
Nah, other users won’t know who you are.
But Reddit can sell your information and send police to your house if you joke about Isreal.
Nah, other users won’t know who you are.
Well, at least until the database inevitably leaks
https://www.pcmag.com/news/reddit-could-soon-require-face-id-to-prove-youre-not-a-bot
Huffman indicated the platform may use decentralized third-party information providers to verify users’ personal details.
“Part of the promise to users is we don’t want to know your name," he told the hosts. "But we want to know that you’re a person.”
Sure, “we don’t want to know your name, we just have to know it or have to have another party that we have access to/a deal with know it”
to your house if you joke about Israel.
Or to any government that pays a lot.
Fr
Considering how “ban evaders,” even when changing devices, moving to different countries and setting up new accounts, are getting miraculously detected and swiftly banned again, I doubt anybody has even a shred of privacy on Reddit.
in order to crack down on
AIunprofitable botsI’m sure they’ll have no issues allowing bots that align with their interests
Requiring face ID AFTER genAI has become great at generating faces is certainly a decision
No one ever accused reddit of making good decisions.
I’d be bold enough to say this decision is absolutely on par with their other brain dead decisions.
They’re maximizing ad revenue, that is the rationale.
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’.
join-lemmy.org now shows you a suggested instance where you can signup immediately. No need to choose an instance.
Because Lemmings can be insufferable sometimes.
So were Redditors 15-20 years ago, though. This place is exactly like the old Reddit ecosystem. Heavily focused on programming, Linux, and Star Trek. The smaller subs for politics, culture, news, etc take longer to build up.
Yeah, we are pretty great 😎
Right… 15 years ago…
I think the downvotes are proving you right 😉
Not gonna lie, I like it this way.
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 👍
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 actually believe AI will provide a far greater advantage to bots than moderators.
Not nearly as much financial incentive for the admins to look the other way
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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
I’m a new lemmy user because of this
So when is this happening, so we can mentally and logistically prepare for the next influx of new users into the fediverse?
I think they’ll announce it. And we’ll have time to prepare for the influx of redditors.
It’s just funny coming from such a new account is all.
Since when is Polymarket’s Twitter account a reliable source of information?
Since when is Polymarket’s Twitter account a reliable source of information?
I can’t comment on that specifically, but it was reported by pcmag and others
Yeah, WTF is this?
People keep reposting Tweets from this stupid gambling site ugh
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.
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…
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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.
BREAKING NEWS! Reddit figured out how to make their platform even shittier
Lemmyflation is real
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politics is at lemmy’s core, it was literally created by communists & socialists to serve as an online community for leftists; not rightists like liberals or conservatives.
Plus…there is a LOT to talk about these days, and most sane takes have been effectively banned from all large platforms lmao, with people helping all this along by voluntarily censoring the DUMBEST FUCKING WORDS in their memes, even, just to further their own reach within those shit holes.
So. Yeah, Lemmy be political.
most sane takes have been effectively banned from all large platforms lmao,
Buckle up, it’s about to get a lot worse when you won’t even be allowed to use social media until you submit to a face scan like op was trying to share.
Yeah….this is the internet……I ain’t showing face. Ass yes, face….not a chance!
I ain’t showing face. Ass yes, face….not a chance!
you’re doing the lord’s work, thank you! lol
And every person too busy or just aloof to bother learning about any of this stuff will just glibly hand it all over, lovely stuff headed our way.
Yes and I got it earlier; it’s just hard to resist responding based on stereotypes. Lol
Same, just commiserating over here.
i got sick of commiserating so i cut off centralized media from my life and my internet experience got reset back to 1995; it’s kind of rediscovering what the internet is like all over again.
You said fucking. Bring me my fainting couch. Fuck I don’t have one.
I agree for the most part. But everything isn’t just a different political view.
You’re literally posting this in an instance where lots of people actively deny the extent of Stalins crimes. Justifying it as “some countries miss the soviet, so he can’t have been that bad” as if the Soviet ended with Stalin and didn’t continue on for decades after.
I don’t know about you. But that is as far away from an echo chamber I think you can get.
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Dude………nobody was gonna tell me there’s an app? I’m over here on brave just chillin. 🤦🏼♂️
There’s Jerboa (the official one), Sync, Voyager, and over a dozen more different front ends.
Just search for Lemmy on Google Play or FDroid and you’ll find options
I dig it. TY
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.
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.
So, you want to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators? The human is smarter, yeah, but not the bot doing the detection.
I don’t know where this is coming from. Nobody is being hired. If anything I’m becoming more anti-mod lately. I feel like put boxes on things that suck oxygen out of the room rapidly. But that’s a different discussion.
Maybe I’m reading this wrong but to clarify I am not saying we need to build our own bot detection but I would be a nice have eventually. I am saying we should be crowd sourcing our collective anger and ADHD or Autism or whatever drives us to post bean moth lemmy slop and instead focus on collection of the worst bot infestations. There are patterns. Bots are not random enough that they can’t be identified with large crowd sourced efforts. They’re also in their infancy which means it will only get harder going forward.
You or I aren’t able to avaliable accurately tell right now. Have you ever seen the Sinclair news video? The one where every news station repeats the same dialogue. Can you or I flip on the news any day of the week and call that out, unlikely. But we can logical understand it is something that happens. It becomes obvious there is a script only when you collect the data and begin to analyze it. That is what I’m saying we need to figure out and gamify.
Name generation, text, patterns. At the start it won’t be accurate. But as more data is collected it’ll become obvious. If the bots were that good, these websites would have left their APIs open. But they closed them so we can’t collect this data. I’m the type of person when powerful people do something like that, I want to know why and work around that. It’s not a coincidence that they locked their sites up when people were given tools where anyone could collect data and feed it into AI for analysis.
Our inaction to do anything when the greatest opportunities are right in front of us but slipping away is a tragedy of this generation.
