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Reddit and FaceID Verification (thelemmy.club)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
350 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] 295 points 5 months ago (6 children)

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."

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  • [–] 138 points 5 months ago* (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 52 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    OG “fake it till you make it” business.

    Feels like 99% of "social" network startups. The dead Internet theory started before the LLM craze.

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  • [–] 25 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Tumblr survived botification largely culturally intact

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I'll have to take your word for it

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    I just can’t read it as anything other than warfarin- how’s it supposed to be pronounced?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 5 months ago*

    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.

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