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submitted 4 days ago by kamayatu24@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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[-] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 points 23 hours ago

Look at this fucking guy. Likely not a bot. But is an example of someone who is posting pattern is suspicious

You have just defined why your method doesn't work.

There is no issue with random people using LLM to craft their messages. The issue is using a network of bots to promote the latest marvel movie

You either detect AI by their language or you don't.

But, I think, I know what you mean. Your idea is like Bat-sonar, the super-totally-not-magical computer he built in the second or third Nolan film that allowed him to spy on everybody and thus detect crimes faster.

You want a system that would monitor ALL content online and detect "patterns". Like, "huh, weirdly, we have XXX number of people writing positively about the new JJ Abrams film", or "check it out, in the past hour we've had 43243 comments negative about MAGA".

Right?

If so: mate... You require literal magic to pull it off. WAY too many false positives or just impossible to trace dependencies. You would have to not only monitor for these patterns, but also associate them with any real-world events (ALL events), because maybe a Polish nationalist politician said something about the financing methods of their military, which got popular on russian Twitter, got a funny anti-MAGA retweet by a Ukrainian, ended up as a reaction video on British TikTok, and got posted to Reddit where it got upvoted to r/All and received 43243 100% legitimate comments complaining about MAGA.

Funnily enough, if anything, MAYBE a complex enough AI system would be capable of finding these patterns, but there's absolutely no physical possibility of humans doing that.

[-] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago

Hey,

What do you think crowd sourcing means. Like what is your definition in relation to building whatever it is you're describing. How did you get there?

[-] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 points 23 hours ago

What do you think crowd sourcing means

It means a bunch of people doing working in very narrow fields that need to be connected by someone with an overarching view, but there are so many so small fields, that it's impossible for a human to handle. In this particular case.

Unless you figured out telepathy. Then I retract my statements - a large enough network of directly connected telepaths could do this.

[-] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 0 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

No it doesn't. That's not it. And this is how i know you're just a terminally online individual arguing out of instinct rather than common sense. Il not be commenting further.

But to my point. Crowd sourcing these things works. It's a missed opportunity in these early days to be passive and more concerned with bean posts.

[-] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 0 points 21 hours ago

You just replied with a "nuh-uh!" and call me "terminally online"? That's a good one.

You seem know a bunch of buzz-words that you don't fully understand, like "crowd sourcing" in this instance. It's like a magic wand, "just crowd source it, and it'll just work", without realising that - again, unless telepathy is involved - a crowd is still just a bunch of individuals. Without instantaneous real time communication no single individual can spot such a massive pattern as those you are after. Without spotting the "big picture", the whole thing is pointless.

[-] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 points 19 hours ago

You can't just magically call everything magical in an attempt to discredit and expect anyone thing you're anybody but dishonest. I'm not spending the evening attempting to keep you on track when you can't be bothered to read and instead you're just looking for bullshit arguments and at worst attempting to discredit for whatever personal reason you have.

[-] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 points 13 hours ago

Again: you're throwing buzz-words around as if they're explanation enough. I'm calling your thinking magical because it is.

Prove me wrong by explaining how do you envision coordinating "crowd sourced pattern spotting" (something that has never been done in the history of mankind, because it "crowd" and "pattern spotting" are almost direct opposites).

There are no "personal reasons" for me saying what I'm saying, nor are my comments "attempts at discrediting". There's literally nothing to discredit here, mate.

[-] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago
[-] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 points 7 hours ago

Your proof of your "crowd source this away" idea is a link to a company that very explicitly uses AI to detect trends...? Are you for real right now?

[-] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

It's evidence that it works. That the missing piece is the crowd source. You said it's impossible and magical. That is wrong. A problem is the datasets are from before the APIs were locked down. It's hard to get new data. New methods are needed.

Dataset is too technical for what I'm saying. But it's still important here. Communities should be built to combat bots, not ignore the problem. There are ways to identify activity and observe and even interfere to the point that it either costs them too much to keep up or makes them ineffective. But there needs to be the community to build that awareness. Instead it seems like the people that are disadvantaged by these networks and bots also have this mentality to ignore and avoid it all.

[-] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 points 59 minutes ago

It’s evidence that it works. That the missing piece is the crowd source. You said it’s impossible and magical

The company you linked is 11-13 people. That's not crowd sourcing, it's just AI doing the work.

So, which is it? Crowd sourcing, or AI fighting AI?

You said it’s impossible and magical. That is wrong.

Yeah, the way you were voicing it originally (crowd sourcing through communities) requires magic. If you're suddenly OK bringing in AI of your own, sure, but then you don't need crowd sourcing - as in the example you yourself posted, a dozen people can do this.

A problem is the datasets are from before the APIs were locked down. It’s hard to get new data. New methods are needed.

You don't need APIs to do this work. You can easily write clients that just read comments as they appear through regular browser clients. The API lock-down was about preventing people from interacting and posting with the content outside of the official app. You can read content just fine (as far as I'm aware, correct me if I'm wrong).

Communities should be built to combat bots

Communities can't do much about it. Sure, they'll ban a bot of five, but your own example showed where the problem lies - you yourself can't tell if a certain user is a bot, or just a propagandist (or passionate about a topic??). Just recently there was a poster on r/cats (or some such) who was banned by mods for being a bot posting AI slop. They had to register a new account, and re-post their photos with a piece of paper with the date and the cat next to each other, the cat just looked weird. But the community mass-reported the post, and the mods didn't notice that it was all legit.

Community work would not work here, it's been proven a billion times already (see: Brexit, 2016 US elections, Romanian elections, Slovenian elections, etc., etc., where network and social media content analysis showed after the fact that there were hundreds of thousands of bot accounts posting russian propaganda).

Instead it seems like the people that are disadvantaged by these networks and bots also have this mentality to ignore and avoid it all.

Much like OP, I agree.

this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
996 points (98.2% liked)

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