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.
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.
You made the right choice by coming here.
Welcome! You’ll fit right in
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.
Nice ! Fuck that rats nest !
BREAKING NEWS! Reddit figured out how to make their platform even shittier
This data surely goes straight to Palentir
Watch /r/politics posts go from 22k upvotes to 3k upvotes overnight.
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.”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The dead internet isn’t a theory on Reddit. It’s a reality there. Almost all traffic is
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Thank you. This is why I’m here.
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.
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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! 🤣
Well that depends. Were you suggesting that he do that officially or unofficially?
Thanks for the welcome
– again. lol
never been happier to have been banned for no reason at all
Can we not quote a Polymarket tweet? WTF.
Well, that’s how it turned out… Sorry! I could have attached a screenshot from another source, but I was in a hurry, so here it is(
I’m a new lemmy user because of this
Welcome to the free side of the internet
Welcome! It’s WAY quieter over here because it’s mostly people, not bots.
Samsies
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.
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Does it still count as a conspiracy theory if it’s objectively true? Hahaha (oh god)
You have to pick a server.
I promise you, that’s why
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.
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”
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.
Oh no, how am I going to pick a server?! That’s even harder than choosing a shirt to put on!
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’.
join-lemmy.org now shows you a suggested instance where you can signup immediately. No need to choose an instance.
Is there a reason to expect bots won’t overwhelm Lemmy as well?
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Most likely, they will. They are not elikely to infect larger instances. Smaller instances will spot them and ban them, I hope.
Not nearly as much financial incentive for the admins to look the other way
This is the real question here. Especially with advanced AI, it might be difficult to spot bot accounts.
I actually believe AI will provide a far greater advantage to bots than moderators.
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.
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.
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?
Because Lemmings can be insufferable sometimes.
Well you are on one of the worst instances.
Have you considered changing instances?
So were Redditors 15-20 years ago, though. This place is exactly like the old Reddit ecosystem. Heavily focused on programming, Linux, and Star Trek. The smaller subs for politics, culture, news, etc take longer to build up.
As opposed to Reddit users?
Yes. There’s much more grand standing.
Well yea but it’s because we’re right 👍
I want most people to switch to lemmy.
I don’t. I want the ones who have something to contribute to a conversation to join Lemmy. I want the rest to take their meme-blasted voids where a person should be and sit in contemplation until they’re ready to join the adults.
Ahahahahahahahahah funny, proooove you are not a bot ! 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 🤣🤣🤣🤣 mehhhh, upload an ID ✔️✔️✔️✔️
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?
They need to filter out unauthorised bots. There’ll still be a fuckton but they’ll be spreading the right propaganda.
The real problem was third party clients I swear
