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.

  • MoonMelon@lemmy.mlEnglish
    200·
    20 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
      97·
      20 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
        37·
        20 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
          18·
          20 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.

              • sakuraba@lemmy.ml
                4·
                19 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.

              • Imaginary_Stand4909@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                3·
                19 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.

          • utopiah@lemmy.ml
            1·
            19 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)

    • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      19 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
      3·
      19 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.

      • AngryDeuce@lemmy.world
        18·
        19 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
          5·
          19 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
          1·
          19 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

  • chunes@lemmy.world
    43·
    19 days ago

    Requiring face ID AFTER genAI has become great at generating faces is certainly a decision

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    43·
    20 days 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

  • Ashrakal@lemmy.ml
    37·
    18 days ago

    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.

      • Ashrakal@lemmy.ml
        3·
        18 days ago

        Thank you! I’ve had the pleasure to notice Lemmy (or this particular instance) is more of an open thinker space, and that’s great to see. It really reminds me of the Internet before the corpos got their hands to squeeze every penny out of the average netizen.

  • NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net
    36·
    19 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.

  • Paranoid Factoid@lemmy.world
    26·
    19 days ago

    It took a lot of customer abuse to break Reddit’s stranglehold, but they are perilously close to a Digg like migration off their platform. Spez can take a hike into bankruptcy.

  • teyrnon@sh.itjust.works
    18·
    20 days ago

    I’m glad they violated my account for a non violation and denied my appeal in the first week of opening a new account then. They aren’t trying to make their moderation believable, I’m persona non grata for whatever reasons, to appease the administration I presume.

    Fuck them, glad I stayed off. I kind of need the help on some stuff though, there just aren’t enough people or communities on here yet.

    • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      20 days ago

      i bet my account is still active somehow; i intentionally violated every rule to get banned during the protest and only 3 or 4 communities banned me; and even then they were just shadow bans.

      • teyrnon@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        20 days ago

        I was saying a lot of questionable luigi mangione related things after that happened, I couched it all, never came right out saying anything, but that might have caught up with me. That was several accounts ago but they can tell it’s you still I hear tell even though I use temporary email to sign up.

        • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          19 days ago

          Yeah, it’s become crystal clear that they just multiple data warehouses and server side tracking to identify people.