Let’s be honest. The fediverse will also have a huge bot problem soon. We kind of have this right now, but if you look a little bit further in the future, when we maybe come a little bit more relevant, spammers and scammers and all those propagandists will also come here. I suspect that they’re already here.
Currently we have no protection at all. You can setup an instance, federate and start with your federated vote manipulation. Our human moderators can’t keep up with bots posting spam to their community and we are totally helpless against LLM bots pushing some agenda.
For some reason, most of the responses welcome that decision!? I guess the others were banned.
The whole text sounds racist AF
Can you explain? I read it and didn’t see anything racist.
Like fuck AI, but the general vibe is that bots are anthropomorphic and we should exclude them by the same reasons we previously were excluding black folks.
LLMs are not people, they do not possess will, they do not possess sapience. Not wanting to deal with LLM output is in no way like excluding a group of people based on arbitrary characteristics.
I honestly only read comments simping spez.
If Reddit loses all the bots, they will literally lose more than half of their activity, especially in an election year.
Sounds like a statement to say they have a hard-on-bots policy, but in practice it seems they won’t care unless there’s significant outcry against a particular account.
I actually read the announcement, and there’s nothing controversial there. They delete 100k bot accounts daily.
It actually sounds like they are allowing bots as long as a human can intervene and is willing to verify their identity if their automated activity is detected. They are embracing slop users as long as they give them their data.
I think the main reason for the announcement, though, was to deal with the rumours that everyone will need to verify their identity (which this post seems to assume is still the case).
Personally, I’d rather see reddit remain the mainstream version of this just so that people who want to run bots for whatever reason have more reason to do it there than here. Because the commercial level ones will have more resources than lemmy admins will have to deal with it.
Then why make the announcement?
You described their normal behavior, now they’ve made this announcement. Something must have changed.
investors getting nervous?
**PRESS RELEASE **
I have done some gardening this morning. I now intend to finish my cup of tea, take a shit, and play some computer games. My day off is proceeding normally. Further details to follow.
That’s Facebook, not Reddit.
From the moment I heard about Facebook, I thought “I don’t want to expose my stream of consciousness thoughts across the Internet, and I DEFINITELY don’t want to follow anyone else’s either.”
Noooooooooooo
Quickly! Everyone start massposting shit about Hegel, Kierkegaard, and sharing 3-hour breadtube essays about leftism to drive off the impending brainrot lol
Do the masses not like discussing Kierkegaard?
Personally, I’d be happy to see more users, particularly in the niche groups which are often dead as a dead thing. I don’t want the bots tho, and I’m thinking that gen AI has probably made the fuckers pretty plausible and hard to identify.
Yeah, the hornyposts have been great for my ability to think about anything other than politics for 5 fucking minutes. I’d like more variety here.
It’s really weird to me how literally anything they say or do is immediately interpreted in the worst possible way here, on Lemmy.
Let’s get real for a second.
Is there a bot problem on the Internet in general? That’s a resounding “yes”.
Do we want to do something about it?
According to OP - no, not at all.
I mean, if OP considers malicious everything that Spez listed, the only remaining course of action is inaction and hoping for the best.
There is a bot problem but ID checks are invasive, and you can stop the bots with things like Hcaptcha Passive and Turnstile which use POW to waste the CPU cycles of bots and look for signs of things like Selenium and Puppeteer controlling the browser.
This is not ID checks.
FFS, do you guys just not understand a thing you’re reading, or flat out refuse to read anything on Reddit?
Who says anything about ID checks or HCaptchas?
Passkeys and hardware attestation are also good as they require a fingerprint or face and bare metal hardware instead of a VM, but Spez also wants to introduce things like the Worldcoin Orb and IDs as well which are too invasive IMO.
Ironically the only thing that will ever work is identifying a user to a person in one form or another. Otherwise it’s just a never ending arms race.
You’re right in theory, but it’s Spez we’re talking about. I tend to consider that the following is a rational reaction to Spez preparing to take any action about anything in any context:
“We can’t let the terrorists win!!”
You’d really hand over your government ID to Spez? Lmao
Did you read the announcement? This has nothing to do with identification.
Did you not read anything from the linked post, or did you fail to understand it?
Who says anything about government ID?
The only thing I miss from reddit is my favorite small niche subs.
Invisible bicycles.
Where people take photos of people on bicycles and Photoshop out the bicycle. You can request or do the edits.
Forbiddensnacks
Photos of stuff that looks like delicious food but is not food.
There was another with short videos of animals in sync. Like chickens or dogs .
Oh and another that was photos of cats, sitting on clear glass. The photos were from the underside.
There was another photoshop battle one. Where there was a prompt and then everyone would submit a photoshopped mash of the prompt.
But I bet AI has ruined that one.
What is this. People posted pictures of stuff that the community tried to figure out what it was
Retro futurism. Just posts about that.
I think I miss forbidden snacks the most.
Im also someone with a million hobbies. So I really miss those. Some are here too. Bigger ones like 3d printing and photography but not stained glass. Not sure if there is one for Blender. I should check.
Subs for specific games like remedy games, zelda. Animal crossing.
Honestly I’m from the time where there used to be forums for these things and I liked forums just fine.
I get that smaller population means less niche communities.
I’m okay with it. But I will be honest and say I miss my niche indie subs. I hate that it’s been ruined. And that it’s dead.
Facebook groups still exist though and many are acceptable. Especially for the indie games and hobbies.
Same style of stuff I miss. Mainly instrument related subreddits, books, and boutique blu-rays. However I don’t miss Reddit itself at all. Especially with how right wing brain rot it became. It felt like hanging out in a Facebook comments section.
Similar vein to forbidden snacks was don’t put your dick in that. Yeah I miss the niche subs too, don’t miss the rest of the bullshit tho.
E. Ask historians was also high grade.
Exactly. For me it was Cats (all animals, really) and Guitars.
Political discussions are far better on Lemmy.
I miss r/fitness. It was big enough but good enough to learn a lot and get motivation.
I miss the TV episode discussions. Even if I wasn’t following live, I could go read the thread and feel the shared excitement and read the theories and there was always something I hadn’t noticed that someone else had.
I miss those the most.
Yeah I also liked the show subs where people theorized and discussed details.
Same. I admit I circled back recently purely for the hype of Hazbin Season 2.
Fortunately, this season was shit so I didn’t spend long on there this time lol
my little hometown somehow had a subreddit. i don’t know how
The good news is that if the fediverse gets an influx of Redditors, maybe we’ll see some of those niches pop up here too. Reddit’s impending identity theft coupled with the insane enforcement of rule 1 they’ve been doing lately is what got me to make my account here.
Psst ,we humans left reddit in 2023
5 more users. I assume that’s the number of users still stupid enough to still be using reddit. I profoundly apologize to the stupid community who are not using reddit.
I profoundly apologize to the stupid community who are not using reddit.
apology accepted
I wouldn’t say users are stupid to still be using Reddit. There’s still alot more activity there and alot of subs still haven’t switched over yet. But if they start requiring identity verification, I think we’ll see alot more switching. Right now, I do both to get the best of both worlds. If I have to give them my identity, they get cut out.
I think people should experience smaller communities, they are often much higher quality in terms of the actual social interactions (though, we’re starting to get our share of trolls and toxic people).
I think there was a big shift for reddit in 2016 after they bought (and then shut down…) AlienBlue and then launch their official app. That moment it felt like when the number of users just exploded, but with that, the quality of posts (and average age of the user) dropped.
Lemmy/the fediverse reminds me of 2010-2015 reddit (which is a good thing!)
I remember when Reddit was run out of spez’s Somerville apartment on a little PC. No subreddits, just one top page. Terrible performance and no users. Everyone was at either Slashdot or Digg. Even Kuro5hin by then was dead. Reddit beat Digg because Digg got stupid and abused their community. Reddit is a million times worse now than Digg ever was.
Yup! I was a part of the mass Digg exodus.
I figured that would happen again with reddit, but to my disappointment the internet is a much different place than it used to be.
There was a competitor of Digg to flee to. Reddit, and the other social media platforms, solved that problem with anticompetitive practices to prevent a migration they previously benefitted from.
Back when Reddit was funny and not a bot hive
I remember /r/AskReddit being THE spot, and it was great to read on the go since it was just text. All the novelty accounts were awesome, RamblesOffTopic being a favorite of mine haha.
…and r/conspiracy was 80% stuff like birds ain’t real and the rest I always assumed was people posting ironically… now I’m not so sure that that was an accurate assessment.
and r/F7U12. It wasn’t just a meme it was an entire meme language, kids these days with their gifs and their template sites… smhing my head
I use user tags pretty heavily, and it is amazing how small Lemmy truly is. I recognize a lot of individual users, and the tag even links back ti whatever post/comment I originally used to tag them.
That’s how the OG Internet communities were. There would be like 500 total people maybe and you’d see them randomly throughout the week as they were online. You don’t know everyone but you recognize most of the names/pfps.
It cuts down on a lot of toxicity when you can actually know who is a jerk and who is probably just having a bad day. It makes the community a bit more empathic and less reactionary.
Indeed!!
As a side tangent, I used to get so mad on old forums when someone would update their avatar lol I didn’t recognize names, I recognized their picture. So if they changed they might as well be a new user until I recognized we’ve spoken before, haha.
I know! I paid an artist, from the forums, to draw my avatar and paid them to update it for holidays and stuff so it was consistent.
Also, you gotta have a good signature. Why not a live updating image of what is playing in your media player, that could not possibly end badly.
Are you getting user tags from a third-party Lemmy app? I don’t see that feature in the web interface.
I think they must be - though I can’t figure out which one, haha.
I can’t figure out how to do it via the website, or Voyager / Mlem on iOS.
In Voyager, you need to enable the feature under Settings -> User Tags.
Voyager implements it entirely on the client; it’s not a feature of Lemmy. Therefore it isn’t available via the Lemmy website.
However, PieFed does have backend support for user tagging. On a PieFed account, you can tag users through the website or through Mlem.
Without bots their most popular text based subs like AITAH or TwoHotTakes would be empty.
Can’t forget /r/worldnews which is literally just an israeli bot farm
They are not actually going to touch these bots. You are just clueless if you think they will remove their own propaganda tools.
“Am I The Asshole for doing what I want with my own life?”
99.99% of posts in that sub
This is going to move the bots to places that don’t check.
And none of them will know about fediverse girl
Do you mean Anubis?
That uses POW which wastes time and CPU, however it does essentially nothing to stop bots, it just makes them slower.
You need to detect the fingerprints of things like Selenium and Multilogin as well as the fingerprint of the whole browser or device to truly stop them.
