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Reddit and FaceID Verification
(thelemmy.club)
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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 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).
Much like OP, I agree.