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 want most people to switch to lemmy.
I used to assume most of the bots belonged to Reddit. I still do, too.
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.
thank god, i need a kick in the ass to get off that poisonous slop
So glad I ditched reddit.
Yep, same!
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?
If the massive waves of permabans they have been doing for anti-trumpers weren’t enough, this should kill the website entirely.
Something something China owns Reddit, something something Trump pissed of China, something something oblique humor here.
Am I doing it right?
[This is a meta-commentary on why I left reddit, thank you for participating]
Ah yes, because bots absolutely haven’t managed to fake/generate faces now have they…
I’m a new lemmy user because of this
Samsies
Welcome! It’s WAY quieter over here because it’s mostly people, not bots.
I’ve been on reddit for 15 years (on and off again, deleting my accounts and then re-signing up later).
I’m looking forward to a fresh start here.
Welcome! It definitely is quieter in ways here, but I find that actually engaging in conversation is better. There’s more real people here.
But this place also has the downfalls that early Reddit and 4chan had. Still better than current Reddit by miles!
I don’t feel like I’m constantly sorting through low quality bot shit to find a human with authentic human expertise.
I do miss the long chains of wordplay, the sense of humor and fun. But Reddit gave that up for ragebait ages ago.
This
Welcome! Hope you find and enjoy your space here
Welcome to the free side of the internet
The real problem was third party clients I swear
I would tell folks on Reddit to come to the fediverse but I deleted all my reddit accounts.
There will be someone who will do it. Don’t worry.
Yeah it’s me.
how many of us noped the fuck outa there when they tried to force their garbage app on us…? this will only hasten it’s demise.
RedReader still works (for now) - and it’s magnificent.
Reddit has had a big problem for a long time, and it has probably only gotten worse. I wouldn’t know, because I, an actual human with an opinion, was permabanned in the post-Inauguration bloodbath.
So let the bots run wild, and finish destroying Reddit.
I mean, requiring FaceID is a horrible idea, but there maybe might be a better alternative (I’m talking about the general idea of a “proof of humanity” online, not specifically using this solution).
The fact of the matter is that bots are a massive issue online. When russia got sanctioned and cut off from the western Internet, r/Conservative went radio silent for a couple of days - until they figured out how to VPN through the Netherlands. There are whole communities where bots discuss bot-posted content. And I have no doubt in my mind that it will also happen on Lemmy as soon as there’s even a hint of profit* to be found.
* “profit” not as in “monetary gain”, but as “any kind of gain, be it money, influence, propaganda, chaos”, etc., etc.
Every so often r/conservative traffic dies down and the subreddit turns much more centrist. It’s never liberal by any stretch but you’ll actually see lots of criticism poke through. Same thing happens with r/politics occasionally. Reddit is just astroturfed so heavily that there isn’t a point to it anymore. You have worse than a coinflips odds on replying to an actual human.
Worldcoin requires you to use their Orb device to sign up, and you can buy a verified account for $20.
There are alternatives we could use.
A bunch of European countries already have “e-IDs” that can share very limited data with a service provider. For instance, Sweden has “Bank ID” (ID generated by you bank), which you can use to, for example, sign in to your housing association’s website. This gives them your name and registered address, immediately giving you the site for your particular community.
You could use a system like that to send only the “this is a human” token. Potentially also “this is an adult”, without giving away any of your personal details, including your date of birth.
Why not use the bots to build bot detectors or categorize places online that are heavily botted, look for patterns and collect data for others to research.
Because they don’t actually want to do that. Having open platforms means actual conversation happens and that’s poison to authoritarians.
It’s a LOT easier to make bots fake being human than it is to detect bots faking being human.
So a computer can’t ever truly generate a random number but it can generate total random dialogue.
I think we just didn’t make an effort to catalog and look hard enough to identify these patterns.
I feel like if we started to truly look at the most obvious place we could see a lot of things that can be used to identify.
Think of it this way: there are billions of types of online interactions where detection is either impossible (an image or link post) or extremely difficult (general conversation where sometimes even humans don’t sound like humans due to slang/education/etc).
Not only that, you’d end up with a “tug of war” where the existence of such detectors would power the improvement of the bots, which would require the improvement of the detector (which is always more difficult).
And the other option is an anonymous token that defines you as a human user. Which is simpler and cheaper to implement?
I think you’re wrong. Completely wrong. There are billions of messages but any intelligent person knows you don’t go through each one by one.
Do you ever see those guys who can look at a picture of a tree in a field and identify where it is in the world. There’s billions of trees. How do they do that with precision?
Classification.
They can train their bots on whatever they want. The human is smarter. If they tune them, you use the methods and knowledge learned and adapt. Like generating random numbers, there’s limits almost always. You don’t find them by inaction.
4chan a website full of racist, neo nazi and pedophiles were just goofing around and they do insane OSNIT research. Lemmy is fucking around with beans and moths. I don’t know. I’m just saddened by the state of things and how much better everybody else is at things I always thought the left was good at. It’s just been eye opening to see.
The human is smarter
So, you want to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators? The human is smarter, yeah, but not the bot doing the detection.
If they tune them, you use the methods and knowledge learned and adapt
You say it like “tuning them” is a magic trick, where they wave their hands a couple of times, and now the detection algorithms are smarter than the bots writing the comments. SOMEONE has to go in, and figure out the maths to make the detection algorithms smarter and better at detecting. That takes time and resources.
You’re also forgetting that “tuning them” works both ways. The people writing the shit-post bots also work on improving their tools, to make them indistinguishable from human posts.
Also: how can you tall that “lol, kys noob” is written by a human, or by a bot? The vast majority of comments online are these short shit-comments.
I’m just saddened by the state of things and how much better everybody else is at things I always thought the left was good at
- 4chan is not “magically” “good” at “OSINT”. They fuck up a lot of things too. It just so happens that what they’re most famous for required one dude who wrote a script, a bunch of kids with bandwidth to spare.
- Their OSINT is super iffy, hit-and-miss. Much like Reddit’s. Or any other large enough community’s.
- What @AnotherUsername@lemmy.ml said.
“the left” is not a monolith. A lot of people have various relationships with"the left". I don’t identify with “the left” much because I disagree, strongly, with being put in a groupthink box. I happen to have some beliefs that the groupthink box on the left has vhemently and painfully attacked me for. But I also REALL REALLY REALLY think the right is wildly wrong, because they’re being simplistic, stupid, and very very corrupt. And I STRONGLY object to corruption. I happen to genuinely and unironically love my country and the promise of a fair chance for all. I love clean water. Clean air. A healthy wilderness ecosystem you can spend time in. Hard work that does good for the world. I love the freedom to research, honestly, and speak freely and without fear.
I don’t see the right sharing some key parts of those values these days. But I’m concerned the left has become too inactive, too sullen, too much a party of victims who lash out reactively.
Don’t have a solution yet except to vote.
Reddit should crack down on human users instead! Let Reddit be AI Bot Exclusive space!
Reddit is no longer for humans. So yes, the situation is pretty dire.
and yet tech bros scrape it for model training and content research. i used to like AskPhilosophy and the likes back when it wasn’t wackjob agora for clinically insane (a decade ago in not more?) but seeing that shit getting mined is baffling because it is basically a deliberate data contamination.
