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.

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    in order to crack down on AI unprofitable bots

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

  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mlEnglish
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    2 months ago

    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.”

    • Prove_your_argument@piefed.socialEnglish
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      2 months ago

      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 advertisements propaganda 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.

    • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • PhoenixDog@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • krisevol@lemmus.orgEnglish
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        2 months ago

        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.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        OG “fake it till you make it” business.

        Feels like 99% of “social” network startups. The dead Internet theory started before the LLM craze.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          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.

              • Imaginary_Stand4909@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
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                2 months ago

                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.

              • sakuraba@lemmy.ml
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                2 months ago

                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.

    • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
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      2 months ago

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

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
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    2 months ago

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

      • BremboTheFourth@piefed.caEnglish
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        2 months ago

        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…

        • teyrnon@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          I can fairly certainly confirm that influnece agents are active on lemmy. Including plenty of US government connected ones ginning up support for the Iran war. Especially on the larger .world accounts it appears.

          • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
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            2 months ago

            .world is no different than reddit and anyone on that instance should expect such skullduggery.

      • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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        2 months ago

        Maybe we can get more people on the Fediverse

        Once there’s enough people on the Fediverse it will get noticed by the Authorities and when that happens you’ll see instances start shutting down as they are unwilling, or unable, to comply with the Age Verification and Social Media laws that are being passed all over the globe.

        I’m somewhat surprised that the NSFW instances haven’t already been hit by the Age Verification laws that many US States have but as soon as a single state, say Utah, notices the rest of them will pile on and the Fediverse will start to unravel.

        This isn’t just a US problem either, there’s Age Verification and Social Media laws being proposed or already in effect in many Western Nations. Hell the two Australian instances are already afoul of the laws in their country so as soon as their Government notices they are going to have some difficult decisions to make.

        • TheMinions@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Ideally a more critical mass so I can talk about my more niche hobbies. Like looking at video game leaks.

          Or something like /r/3d6 on reddit.

  • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • astraeus@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      Making a new Reddit account as a human in 2026 genuinely sucks too most subreddits just automod ban new accounts with low comment karma… but if every popular sub has said automod… yeah. And then 99% of the front page is astroturfed anyway

      • quick_snail@feddit.nl
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        2 months ago

        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.

      • obvs@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • yucandu@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          and block browser fingerprinting.

          FYI that just makes you stand out like a sore thumb. With the current state of user tracking, it’s better to blend in than to look like you’re hiding something.

          • obvs@lemmy.world
            0·
            2 months ago

            Without blocking browser fingerprinting, they can identify your specific computer regardless of how many different accounts you use or how many different browsers you use.

            Correct browser fingerprinting blocking does NOT block attempts to fingerprint. It just generates false information for their fingerprint detection tools.

        • searabbit@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          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.

  • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    AAA…HaHaHaHaHa!
    “Come on. I want you to do it, I want you to do it. Come on, HIT ME!”

  • orc girly@lemmy.ml
    0·
    2 months ago

    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

    • kamayatu24@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      2 months ago

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

    • PhoenixDog@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      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 Israel.

      • 001Guy001@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        2 months ago

        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”

    • PrimeMinisterKeyes@leminal.spaceEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

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

  • ceenote@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    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?