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.
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Then once they can ID them, instead of banning bots, they’ll find a way to charge a premium for running a bot account.
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.”
If not already, I assume they’ll offer a for-fee API for bots.
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.
Pretty sure it dates back to the dawn of commerce.
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
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?
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.
The dead internet isn’t a theory on Reddit. It’s a reality there. Almost all traffic is
Exactly this. The bots are coming from inside the house.
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.
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.
I think it more means “we want to sell your face data”
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 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.
it’s too late for me to leave reddit. 😔
Me too. I left a couple of years ago 😔️
I suppose I could rejoin, and leave again?
Assert dominance.
I see the rationale, dead internet theory and all. The problem is that if this happened, I 100% believe Reddit would form a partnership with the US government or oil companies to put bots on their platform and spread misinformation.
They’re already doing that: https://gizmodo.com/reddit-meta-and-google-voluntarily-gave-dhs-info-of-anti-ice-users-report-says-2000722279
Not specifically putting bots on Reddit though, based on the headline of that article.
Or? I think you mean and. Then throw several more ands in there, including AI platforms, surveillance tech, right wing PACs, and overall enshitification and misinformation.
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.
Where is the link so I can read about it
Ahahahahahahahahah funny, proooove you are not a bot ! 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 🤣🤣🤣🤣 mehhhh, upload an ID ✔️✔️✔️✔️
Do it. I can’t wait for it.
Maybe we can get more people on the Fediverse lol
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…
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.
.world is no different than reddit and anyone on that instance should expect such skullduggery.
I’m on .world and on reddit, and reddit is much, much worse.
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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.
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.
Lemmyflation is real
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.
Spez can eat my ass in hell if he thinks he’s getting any more of my info.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AAA…HaHaHaHaHa!
“Come on. I want you to do it, I want you to do it. Come on, HIT ME!”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
Why not start over and create that communities? This was the start of Lemmy, we just copied famous subreddits and do the same stuff over here. Trust me, I was there.
because i am le tired
There’s piefed and lemmy and kbin, any of those is good tbh.
ROFL. Man Spez is stupid.
