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.

  • MoonMelon@lemmy.ml
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    27 days ago

    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.”

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      27 days ago

      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.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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        27 days ago

        OG “fake it till you make it” business.

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

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          27 days ago

          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.

              • sakuraba@lemmy.ml
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                26 days ago

                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.

          • utopiah@lemmy.ml
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            26 days ago

            Indeed, when I read this parent comment I had in mind a snake oil salesman in Lucky Luke (Doc Doxey’s Elixir, volume 38)

      • krisevol@lemmus.org
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        27 days ago

        I read somewhere that it’s estimated that reddit is 90% bots in the comments, and we already know 99% of front page context is from bots accounts.

    • davel@lemmy.ml
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      27 days ago

      If not already, I assume they’ll offer a for-fee API for bots.

    • PhoenixDog@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      JUST IN: Reddit CEO says company is considering requiring all bots on the platform to click on ads in order to drive revenue to Reddit.

      • AngryDeuce@lemmy.world
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        26 days ago

        Ditto!

        Well that and they permabanned my 14 year old, 1million karma account for making a post that insinuated Donald is a pedophile that some MAGA got all upset about and they rejected my appeal.

        So…fuck em.

        • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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          26 days ago

          Mine was for suggesting Biden drone strike SCOTUS justices immediately after they ruled that the president is effectively above the law. I wasn’t advocating for Biden to do anything illegal! 🤣

        • Taldan@lemmy.world
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          25 days ago

          I had a similar account that got banned for connecting to the wrong VPN endpoint. Clicked a random server from my VPN provider, suddenly my account was permanently banned with no ability to appeal

          Thinking it was just some issue on my end (it was a non-standard looking ban), I logged into another OG account of mine, which also promptly got perma-banned

          Extreme incompetence for them to be issuing perma-bans like that based on IP address

    • Shellofbiomatter@lemmus.org
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      26 days ago

      It still is more populated and has a lot higher activity, which suits slightly better for doomscrolling.

      Lemmy needs to get slightly more popular. And maybe a centralized place to find different instances?
      Like i haven’t found any active fitness related ones.

      It’s like coming from a convention Hall full of people and going into a minimally occupied hotel.

  • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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    27 days ago

    in order to crack down on AI unprofitable bots

    I’m sure they’ll have no issues allowing bots that align with their interests

  • chunes@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    Requiring face ID AFTER genAI has become great at generating faces is certainly a decision

  • Ashrakal@lemmy.ml
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    25 days ago

    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.

      • Ashrakal@lemmy.ml
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        25 days ago

        Thank you! I’ve had the pleasure to notice Lemmy (or this particular instance) is more of an open thinker space, and that’s great to see. It really reminds me of the Internet before the corpos got their hands to squeeze every penny out of the average netizen.

  • Paranoid Factoid@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    It took a lot of customer abuse to break Reddit’s stranglehold, but they are perilously close to a Digg like migration off their platform. Spez can take a hike into bankruptcy.

  • davel@lemmy.ml
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    27 days ago

    My laptop’s TPM requires a pint of blood to allow booting to an OS. Two pints if it’s Linux.

    • auntieclokwise@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      That’s part of why I made my account here. Might as well start getting familiar with the alternative. That and the mods on Reddit are out of control handing out bans for jokes about violence. Like the other day, I joked we should shoot robot dogs and got handed a site wide 3 day ban.