verification is just a fancy marketing word for ‘Digital Tagging’. We are witnessing the death of the anonymous internet in real-time. First, they track your clicks, then they demand your ID under the ‘anti-bot’ excuse By 2026, the digital grid will be so tight that ‘Human’ and ‘User ID’ will be inseparable. Glad I jumped ship to the Fediverse before the cage doors locked. This is exactly why I’ve been documenting this transition from the 90s privacy to the 2026 surveillance grid the ‘Exodus’ has truly begun
We are witnessing the death of the anonymous internet in real-time.
Fedi is still here :3
if u want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes regarding the end of anonymous life check out chapter 17 in my book… i’d love to get ur thoughts on it since u clearly see whats comin https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=-0_GEQAAQBAJ
yo karl u hit the nail on the head fr… spez is just the beginnin. we r literally watchin the 2026 digital cage being built right now. i actually spent a lot of time writin about this exact ‘death of anonymity’ in my book final exodus. its crazy how what we thought was fiction is becomin our daily reality. fedi is the last lifeboat left tbh
This is pretty uncontroversial as far as reddit announcements go. They aren’t requiring identity verification.
Spez announces they won’t tolerate competing astroturfing, only shareholder-approved bots will remain.
Getting rid of bots on reddit wojld be as easy as image recognition the same chicks every fucking day aross a million subreddits.
Bots suck but so does age verification
Isnt everyone using it paying an API cost monthly? It should basically already be verified, otherwise why the fuck should anyone pay shit?
Let’s be honest. The fediverse will also have a huge bot problem soon. We kind of have this right now, but if you look a little bit further in the future, when we maybe come a little bit more relevant, spammers and scammers and all those propagandists will also come here. I suspect that they’re already here.
Currently we have no protection at all. You can setup an instance, federate and start with your federated vote manipulation. Our human moderators can’t keep up with bots posting spam to their community and we are totally helpless against LLM bots pushing some agenda.
Yup. Conspiracy theories aside, the bot problem is an actual hard problem to solve.
Team Fortress 2 players reliving their PTSD trauma with your comment
Agree, hard indeed. Any solution will have problems. False positives. False negatves. Violating privacy.
So far, maybe Lemmy flew under the radar and it’s a nice enough place. But I don’t see how that can continue longterm.
It is sad to me. Anything nice eventually gets ruined.
There’s a boiling point to almost everything, and lemmy trying to be an umbrella of communities rather than topic-specific, good old forums is the crux. When you narrow completely down and focus on one main, maybe 2 adjacent topics, and the rest is piled into off-topic board - it’s stupidly easy to ID bots.
we have tools like defederating any instance filled with bots but we definitely need more
How would that help? Bots will just move to another instance. Maybe yours.
I mean it literally helps to defederate an instance overrun by bots because that means no one is taking care of banning them and manually review sign-ups, so you defend your instance of that spam/slop.
The best part is that defederation is not final so when that instance is finally healthy again it can be federated.
I think people here are missing the difference between reddit and any instance on the fediverse. Every instance admin has the power to control their federation and it is in their best interest to review sign-ups to a certain degree. Unlike reddit there is no urge to fill the site with ‘users’ to inflate numbers and sell ads.
I honestly only read comments simping spez.
Noooooooooooo
Quickly! Everyone start massposting shit about Hegel, Kierkegaard, and sharing 3-hour breadtube essays about leftism to drive off the impending brainrot lol
Personally, I’d be happy to see more users, particularly in the niche groups which are often dead as a dead thing. I don’t want the bots tho, and I’m thinking that gen AI has probably made the fuckers pretty plausible and hard to identify.
Yeah, the hornyposts have been great for my ability to think about anything other than politics for 5 fucking minutes. I’d like more variety here.
Do the masses not like discussing Kierkegaard?
The whole text sounds racist AF
Can you explain? I read it and didn’t see anything racist.
I find it interesting that, as you point out, his comment makes zero sense but still gets upvotes, and then as he clarifies he’s saying it’s racist against chatbots, then people are unambiguously “oh hell no”
Some people upvote at a baseless accusation of racism without actually actually seeing racism or getting clarification that they may have missed… That’s a bit sad…
Like fuck AI, but the general vibe is that bots are anthropomorphic and we should exclude them by the same reasons we previously were excluding black folks.
LLMs are not people, they do not possess will, they do not possess sapience. Not wanting to deal with LLM output is in no way like excluding a group of people based on arbitrary characteristics.
They do not, but you can still be a racist towards them. It’s not about llms, it’s about you
The general vibe is that LLMs are glorified magic 8 balls that tell you what you want to hear. Honestly I’d rather listen to a magic 8 ball over an AI because it’ll actually disagree with you.
You cant be racist towards an object or a piece of tech BECAUSE THEY ARENT SENTIENT NOR ARE THEY A RACE.
BECAUSE THEY ARENT SENTIENT NOR ARE THEY A RACE.
They are not, but you still can be racist towards them
Explain how you can be racist towards something inherently raceless and non-sentient? That’s like saying you can be racist towards a fucking furby.
Racism is never about empirical properties of its object. The object is always constructed and reflects the racist’s fantasies
I think the point they’re trying to make is that racism is a state of mind, and opening oneself up to being racist against a non-human or imaginary thing can open the floodgates to more “real” forms of racism against fellow humans.
Basically the difference between anthropomorphizing bots while one expresses their dislike for interacting with them vs. expressing one’s dislike of being forced to interact with a machine that is made to feel like interacting with a person but isn’t.
I’m not sure how I feel about this sentiment I’ve described, but it’s one I’m open to arguments on since as a white dude I come into it with a mountain of privilege that likely blinds my view of things
And none of them will know about fediverse girl
Do you mean Anubis?
That uses POW which wastes time and CPU, however it does essentially nothing to stop bots, it just makes them slower.
You need to detect the fingerprints of things like Selenium and Multilogin as well as the fingerprint of the whole browser or device to truly stop them.
Without bots their most popular text based subs like AITAH or TwoHotTakes would be empty.
“Am I The Asshole for doing what I want with my own life?”
99.99% of posts in that sub
or the overreacting sub: “my husband beat me to a pulp and set our cat on fire, am I overreacting for considering a divorce?”
Can’t forget /r/worldnews which is literally just an israeli bot farm
They are not actually going to touch these bots. You are just clueless if you think they will remove their own propaganda tools.
Spez is a spaz that can’t spell. Fuck posting anything CEOs say they all suck, take their voice.
I actually read the announcement, and there’s nothing controversial there. They delete 100k bot accounts daily.
It actually sounds like they are allowing bots as long as a human can intervene and is willing to verify their identity if their automated activity is detected. They are embracing slop users as long as they give them their data.
I think the main reason for the announcement, though, was to deal with the rumours that everyone will need to verify their identity (which this post seems to assume is still the case).
Personally, I’d rather see reddit remain the mainstream version of this just so that people who want to run bots for whatever reason have more reason to do it there than here. Because the commercial level ones will have more resources than lemmy admins will have to deal with it.
Then why make the announcement?
You described their normal behavior, now they’ve made this announcement. Something must have changed.
**PRESS RELEASE **
I have done some gardening this morning. I now intend to finish my cup of tea, take a shit, and play some computer games. My day off is proceeding normally. Further details to follow.
That’s Facebook, not Reddit.
From the moment I heard about Facebook, I thought “I don’t want to expose my stream of consciousness thoughts across the Internet, and I DEFINITELY don’t want to follow anyone else’s either.”
investors getting nervous?
I think people should experience smaller communities, they are often much higher quality in terms of the actual social interactions (though, we’re starting to get our share of trolls and toxic people).
I use user tags pretty heavily, and it is amazing how small Lemmy truly is. I recognize a lot of individual users, and the tag even links back ti whatever post/comment I originally used to tag them.
Are you getting user tags from a third-party Lemmy app? I don’t see that feature in the web interface.
I think they must be - though I can’t figure out which one, haha.
I can’t figure out how to do it via the website, or Voyager / Mlem on iOS.
In Voyager, you need to enable the feature under Settings -> User Tags.
Voyager implements it entirely on the client; it’s not a feature of Lemmy. Therefore it isn’t available via the Lemmy website.
However, PieFed does have backend support for user tagging. On a PieFed account, you can tag users through the website or through Mlem.
That’s how the OG Internet communities were. There would be like 500 total people maybe and you’d see them randomly throughout the week as they were online. You don’t know everyone but you recognize most of the names/pfps.
It cuts down on a lot of toxicity when you can actually know who is a jerk and who is probably just having a bad day. It makes the community a bit more empathic and less reactionary.
Indeed!!
As a side tangent, I used to get so mad on old forums when someone would update their avatar lol I didn’t recognize names, I recognized their picture. So if they changed they might as well be a new user until I recognized we’ve spoken before, haha.
I know! I paid an artist, from the forums, to draw my avatar and paid them to update it for holidays and stuff so it was consistent.
Also, you gotta have a good signature. Why not a live updating image of what is playing in your media player, that could not possibly end badly.
Guy, never forget that internet was built for porn and sarcasm, later renamed trolling, and you’re supposed to have higher than room temperature IQ to be here and properly enjoy it.
I think there was a big shift for reddit in 2016 after they bought (and then shut down…) AlienBlue and then launch their official app. That moment it felt like when the number of users just exploded, but with that, the quality of posts (and average age of the user) dropped.
Lemmy/the fediverse reminds me of 2010-2015 reddit (which is a good thing!)
I remember when Reddit was run out of spez’s Somerville apartment on a little PC. No subreddits, just one top page. Terrible performance and no users. Everyone was at either Slashdot or Digg. Even Kuro5hin by then was dead. Reddit beat Digg because Digg got stupid and abused their community. Reddit is a million times worse now than Digg ever was.
Yup! I was a part of the mass Digg exodus.
I figured that would happen again with reddit, but to my disappointment the internet is a much different place than it used to be.
There was a competitor of Digg to flee to. Reddit, and the other social media platforms, solved that problem with anticompetitive practices to prevent a migration they previously benefitted from.
Agreed. I remember leaving MySpace for Facebook (shit I even remember Xanga before MySpace).
At some point, it felt like the internet just got smaller, became 5 websites. And on those 5 websites, you’d find something like: a picture of a tweet posted to reddit and the tweet is about an instagram post"
Really disheartening as someone who came up with the “wild west” internet (which definitely had its issues, but it felt like human issues, not corporate issues)
Back when Reddit was funny and not a bot hive
I remember /r/AskReddit being THE spot, and it was great to read on the go since it was just text. All the novelty accounts were awesome, RamblesOffTopic being a favorite of mine haha.
…and r/conspiracy was 80% stuff like birds ain’t real and the rest I always assumed was people posting ironically… now I’m not so sure that that was an accurate assessment.
and r/F7U12. It wasn’t just a meme it was an entire meme language, kids these days with their gifs and their template sites… smhing my head
If Reddit loses all the bots, they will literally lose more than half of their activity, especially in an election year.
Sounds like a statement to say they have a hard-on-bots policy, but in practice it seems they won’t care unless there’s significant outcry against a particular account.
literally elon’s twitter strategy
