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
    294·
    5 个月前

    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
      137·
      5 个月前

      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.

      • Iori_Yagami_Fighter@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        3 天前

        How can you tell? Not attacking, just curious. I never could tell, well maybe if usernames are all oddly similarly patterned, and even than, I can’t be sure it’s not some app/program that hands out those ids when you register in it, as people sometimes can be too lazy to come up with a meaningful username. Short comments can also be made by dumb humans, long posts can be written by modern Artificial Idiot. 20 years ago, I could tell spam post, cause they all were literally either identical to each other, or at least totally ignored context and never responded to questions. Now I am not sure at all. Definitely some people are less eloquent than AI.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
        53·
        5 个月前

        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
          26·
          5 个月前

          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
                5·
                5 个月前

                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
                4·
                5 个月前

                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·
            5 个月前

            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·
        5 个月前

        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·
      5 个月前

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

    • Prove_your_argument@piefed.socialEnglish
      12·
      5 个月前

      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·
      5 个月前

      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 almost by definition cheatable by AI.

    • PhoenixDog@lemmy.world
      5·
      5 个月前

      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.

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    64·
    5 个月前

    in order to crack down on AI unprofitable bots

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

      • Hominine@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        5 个月前

        You’re probably right and this is the first time I’ve felt kind of glad for the “speed bump” that picking a server on the fediverse has become. We’ll get another influx before too long; maybe a “you need to be this clever to ride the ride” checkpoint isn’t such a bad thing.

        • low@lemmy.today
          6·
          5 个月前

          That’s what I thought when I initially signed up but I’m realizing we lack diversity baaaaaaad. I’d wager 90%+ of users are tech people and we are infamously antisocial, which is rough for a “social media”

      • robocall@lemmy.world
        5·
        5 个月前

        Selecting a server wasn’t an issue for me. The RIF app told me to go to .world and I quickly decided it was the right instance for me to start.

        I moreso had to adjust to the slower pace and less engagement on Lemmy compared to reddit, the lack of niche communities, my favorite subs not having a perfect equivalent here.

        I was super pissed off with reddit and am still salty, so my anger committed me to making the commitment to Lemmy. I was addicted to reddit and they took away the app I was using for over 10 years. I wasn’t ready for the breakup and was scorned. I was highly motivated to make Lemmy work for me.

        Users need that level of anger and outrage to motivate them.

        • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
          4·
          5 个月前

          It’s weird, but that shit intimidates non technical people, and there are a lot of them. It would need better if it says something like ‘Click on the flag of the country closest to where you live’ or something like that.

          Linux seems to have managed to do this - I recently did I mint install on my laptop, it was all GUI, no arcane jargon, no need to use the console, really well optimised for the non-technical folk. You’d be surprised how many people see ‘server’ and think ‘I don’t have one of those, and I don’t think I want one’.

      • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
        5·
        5 个月前

        Most likely, they will. They are not elikely to infect larger instances. Smaller instances will spot them and ban them, I hope.

          • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
            1·
            5 个月前

            They will still infect them but they will be more obvious.

            An unusual comment, you don’t know it’s a bot.

            Hundreds of unusual comments and doesn’t engage with the local community. It’s a bot.

            It’s partly why online discourse is toxic. There is a disconnect with th real world and online and no social stigma. On a small community instances there is.

            The problem though, will be trying to manage which isntances need to be blocked as they are rampant with bota. If the fediverse grows and there are lots of smaller communities,.it will be harder to keep track. Currently it’s small and most instances with active users are familiar.

    • Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.orgEnglish
      3·
      5 个月前

      It still is more populated and has a lot higher activity, which suits slightly better for doomscrolling.

      Lemmy needs to get slightly more popular. And maybe a centralized place to find different instances?
      Like i haven’t found any active fitness related ones.

      It’s like coming from a convention Hall full of people and going into a minimally occupied hotel.

      • birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        2·
        5 个月前

        Centralisation of power is in the first place why we moved away from Reddit. Fuck that.

        You can find your own fitness sidelemmy. There are actually a few I found.

        • Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.orgEnglish
          1·
          5 个月前

          Completely fair, just the difference and lack of constant flow of content is going to put off many people and without a significant enough drive there’s no point to get used to the new environment.

          Mind pointing me in a the right direction?

      • BlackPenguins@lemmy.world
        3·
        5 个月前

        This is basically all I use for now. Lemmy doesn’t have the infrastructure for every TV episode and movie I watch.

        • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
          4·
          5 个月前

          yeah. and even in the generic tv show communities there are maybe a couple people discussing a new episode, if at all.

          Compared to thousands for a popular show.

          heck, even star trek is barely active compared to reddit. and they did an official migration in the beginning

  • chunes@lemmy.world
    57·
    5 个月前

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

    • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      5 个月前

      Next step will be to require Video with bop-it style live instructions, stick out your tongue, blink one eye, pick your nose, make finger guns, smile, frown. They won’t care that it’s not disability friendly.

      • Lucelu2@lemmy.zip
        5·
        5 个月前

        Facebook tried to make me take a video of myself moving my head around making different facial expressions to prove I was a person. I was like… not even my bank requires that. This was after making a comment that was Trump-negging. So I cancelled it.

      • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        5 个月前

        Discord has a similar system in place, people were defeating it with the Photo mode in Death Standing lmao

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
    49·
    5 个月前

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

  • Ashrakal@lemmy.ml
    44·
    5 个月前

    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.

  • NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net
    41·
    5 个月前

    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.

    • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      34·
      5 个月前

      politics is at lemmy’s core, it was literally created by communists & socialists to serve as an online community for leftists; not rightists like liberals or conservatives.

      • PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        25·
        5 个月前

        Plus…there is a LOT to talk about these days, and most sane takes have been effectively banned from all large platforms lmao, with people helping all this along by voluntarily censoring the DUMBEST FUCKING WORDS in their memes, even, just to further their own reach within those shit holes.

        So. Yeah, Lemmy be political.

        • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
          8·
          5 个月前

          most sane takes have been effectively banned from all large platforms lmao,

          Buckle up, it’s about to get a lot worse when you won’t even be allowed to use social media until you submit to a face scan like op was trying to share.

            • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              5 个月前

              I ain’t showing face. Ass yes, face….not a chance!

              you’re doing the lord’s work, thank you! lol

          • PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            4·
            5 个月前

            And every person too busy or just aloof to bother learning about any of this stuff will just glibly hand it all over, lovely stuff headed our way.

            • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
              3·
              5 个月前

              Yes and I got it earlier; it’s just hard to resist responding based on stereotypes. Lol

                • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
                  2·
                  5 个月前

                  i got sick of commiserating so i cut off centralized media from my life and my internet experience got reset back to 1995; it’s kind of rediscovering what the internet is like all over again.

    • Atomic@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      5 个月前

      I agree for the most part. But everything isn’t just a different political view.

      You’re literally posting this in an instance where lots of people actively deny the extent of Stalins crimes. Justifying it as “some countries miss the soviet, so he can’t have been that bad” as if the Soviet ended with Stalin and didn’t continue on for decades after.

      I don’t know about you. But that is as far away from an echo chamber I think you can get.

    • H3ckler26@lemmy.org
      3·
      5 个月前

      Dude………nobody was gonna tell me there’s an app? I’m over here on brave just chillin. 🤦🏼‍♂️