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Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users (www.semafor.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 199 points 1 year ago (27 children)

On the one hand, I understand the inherent limitations of pseudonymous social media and why a corporation and even end users might benefit from authoritative user identification.

On the other hand, oh hell no.

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  • [–] 160 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    Exactly. Reddit isn’t my fucking bank. They don’t need to know who I am.

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  • [–] 50 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Your bank doesn't even need to know who you are.

    On a related note, Bank of America, if you're reading this, my name is floop @lemmy.dbzer0.com, and I would like to withdraw all the money from my account. Nonsequential bills please!

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Whatcha mean, they obviously need to count the wrinkles on your dirty balloon knot.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)
    1. Saved them the trouble.
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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Wow who's your butthole guy?

    Wtf is this sorcery your post says "1." but when I reply its "37."

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    huh... maybe because of the period and no space? Markdown thinks it's a list item?

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I mean, there's someone here who has (not even exaggerating) 15+ accounts that they just rotate thru.

    It's a hassle to block them all because I still see new ones, but I'll take that over "proving myself" as a unique person with something like this.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago* (7 children)

    I don't think psudonyms are an issue, but verifying that a user is an actual person vs an AI chatbot is absolutely something that every popular social media platform will need to tackle at some point.

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  • [–] 47 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Hmm funny how Sam Altman is one of the few people responsible for creating that problem and now he's selling the solution to it

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago

    It's actually low-key brilliant. Start a gold rush, when you realize the gold isn't actually there, pivot to selling shovels and keep hyping the gold rush. Fools and their money are soon parted, and there seem to be an endless supply of them.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago*

    The bot problem has been around since before Sam Altman was old enough to legally drink. For example in the early days the founders of Reddit were running bots to make the site look wayyy busier than it actually was in order to attract new users.

    He's a convenient bogey-man, and a huge asshole, but he's the not the source of this problem.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Will they though? Facebook has already created undisclosed bot accounts themselves before. A Platform where real users and such bots are indistinguishable (for the user) sounds like a social media corpos and authoritarian governments wet dream to me. Also reminds me of the attempts to disguise ads as natural content.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    As explained, it's not even quite user identification, but rather verification of a unique individual. The ability to identify that an account is held by a unique person (as opposed to possibility being one of many puppet accounts) is pretty useful, particularly if it's not possible to backtrace it to an otherwise identifiable person.

    Even so, the problem I see with this system is that a person has to be careful to never, ever, ever associate their unique ID with themselves, though there will be constant pressure to do so.

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