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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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…
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.
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.
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 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.
Because they don’t actually want to do that. Having open platforms means actual conversation happens and that’s poison to authoritarians.
Yea I prefer to get my Reddit news from a gambling site that facilitates bets on human lives.
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?
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 :)
Thanks for the welcome
BREAKING NEWS! Reddit figured out how to make their platform even shittier
They want to turn Reddit into a rightwing echo chamber. Lately there are so many comments on lemmy about people getting perma banned, including myself, for breaking rule 1. However in most cases, like myself, only made a comment without any harm or even a reference to violence. I only commented that ICE can forget about their payments and bonuses and that in 3 years time, they’ll be sucking immigrant cock behind a Wendy’s. That got me a perma ban after 15 years on Reddit. All these tech bros are bending the knee and getting taken from behind. Such short term thinking will become their downfall. If this happens, it’ll be a good thing for Lemmy.
Yeah they have really gone over the top with enforcing R1. Upvoting is already enough to get banned as it falls under sharing and it doesn’t have to actually mention any harm to the individual, just reference R1.
I mean, I got a 3 day ban (R1) for joking that we should shoot robot dogs guarding AI datacenters. It’s literally not one of the categories that is even supposed to apply - it’s neither a person, nor a place, nor some kind of animal. And that was my second account after my first got banned for similar sorts of jokes (yes, some were people, all were obviously jokes). Yeah, they’re going crazy overboard with enforcement on that. Subreddits need to start moving over now.
You have to pick a server.
I promise you, that’s why
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’.
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.
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”
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.
Not nearly as much financial incentive for the admins to look the other way
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 😉
Have you considered changing instances?
I just block people. That’s much more effective.
Well you are on one of the worst instances.
As opposed to Reddit users?
Yes. There’s much more grand standing.
Well yea but it’s because we’re right 👍
Goodbye 99% of reddit users.
You’ll be surprised at how okay people are with mass surveillance if it encroaches on their addiction
Reddit CEO: “What? We can’t sell user data on our increasingly punitive and terrible site because the bots keep fucking up the models trained on that data? Hold my beer…”
Astroturfing is only allowed from premium accounts.
Where is the link so I can read about it
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.
