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.

  • Taldan@lemmy.world
    22·
    3 days ago

    They made it easier for bots to thrive by allowing hidden post histories, limiting the API, and punishing users for “bad” reports, but claim they need face ID to filter out bots?

  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mlEnglish
    291·
    4 days 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.”

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      135·
      4 days 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.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
        531·
        4 days 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
          261·
          4 days 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
                3·
                3 days 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
                4·
                3 days 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.

          • utopiah@lemmy.ml
            1·
            3 days ago

            Indeed, when I read this parent comment I had in mind a snake oil salesman in Lucky Luke (Doc Doxey’s Elixir, volume 38)

      • krisevol@lemmus.orgEnglish
        18·
        4 days 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.

    • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
      16·
      4 days ago

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

    • Prove_your_argument@piefed.socialEnglish
      12·
      3 days 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
      6·
      3 days 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
      5·
      3 days 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.

  • NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net
    39·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • python@lemmy.world
      6·
      3 days ago

      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?

      • Angrydeuce@lemmy.world
        27·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
          8·
          3 days ago

          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! 🤣

        • Taldan@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 days ago

          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

        • Lucelu2@lemmy.zip
          5·
          3 days ago

          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).

  • Alaknár@sopuli.xyz
    285·
    3 days ago

    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.

  • LoafedBurrito@lemmy.world
    163·
    3 days ago

    If the massive waves of permabans they have been doing for anti-trumpers weren’t enough, this should kill the website entirely.