Reddit will tighten verification to keep out human-like AI bots
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/06/reddit-will-tighten-verification-to-keep-out-human-like-ai-bots/Open linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com280
Comments104https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/06/reddit-will-tighten-verification-to-keep-out-human-like-ai-bots/Open linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com
No they won't lol
If they didn't do it already, it's not gonna happen now. This is lip service to the shareholders
They want more users to make accounts. Blocking nsfw content to non-users was a start but now they can make a bigger push.
Nsfw Still works in old.reddit as a non user.
Or so a friend tells me
It's in their best interest to suppress non-human conversations. What are you talking about?
Is it? Reddit has been full of bots for years.
And if the r/CMV thing didn't make it apparently, the recent wave of them weren't "caught in the act" and only became a "problem" when the researchers announced their shitty experiment.
If realistic chat bots can fool the masses, why on earth would reddit get rid of them? It helps their metrics. "Look at how active our site is! Buy stock!"
Meta is paying to make its bots, Reddit gets it for free!
A metabot walked into a subreddit...
half of thier site are bots, RUSSIA probably makes a majority of those bots, something reddit isnt doing anything about
You're not wrong but what does Russia have to do with anything here?
Shitty experiment? On the contrary, it was an amazing experiment.
I know you enjoy hating on Reddit but what you're saying doesn't make any sense. Reddit is an advertising business. Bots don't view advertising but adds infrastructure cost. Additionally, humans are way better at engagement with the platform and people than bots.
Bot activity brings "engagement" which generated more page views from actual humans. Literally the only downside of this announcement is the optics of having bots in the first place.
The bots were already indistinguishable from humans on reddit, do you really think that this recent scrutiny is going to lead to fewer bots? Or might it actually lead to better bots?
Additionally additionally, as it says in the article, reddit sells its content to OpenAI, and in order to do that, they need it to be organic. If you feed AI output back info AI, it makes the output worse, not better. So, there's another financial incentive to ensure that the people talking on reddit are actually human.
If openai kept buying reddit data after 2022, they are idiots. They let the cat out of the bag.
they are selling it to both OPENAI and google for thier AI too.
I would like to remind you of two things. The first is that reddit used to have a mod tool called "BotDefense". Its shutdown in July of 2023 directly lead to a major uptick in Spam Bots.
The second is that part of the ad revenue is "impressions". Impressions are just an account (bot or human) "viewing" the ad and they do not require a click-through. The platform hosting the ad still gets paid for those.
Yeh but feeding reddit user output into AI is part of the reason why AI is so confidently incorrect so often.
No it isn't and they have openly talked about doing this practice back in the early days of reddit to make the site appear more active than it really was. Nothing has changed.
Only their own bots are allowed.
Where on Earth have you gotten that bizarre idea? It is in their interest to promote engagement, human or not, by any means necessary.
Yeah it's definitely the bots and not the fashy admins that drove me away from reddit.
I mean the bots don't help. The sheer number of obviously AI subreddits and response farms is crazy. There's like 6 prominent "Am I the Assholes", a bunch of text message "screenshot" subreddits which have always been easy to fake, and a bunch of "explain the joke" ones too. I stop reading halfway through most text posts and comments because it's obviously AI
the number of the explain the joke threads on the all page is ridiculous.
I made a lemmy post about it but I theorize they're crowdsourced AI training. Post something, post a couple of separate AI interpretations of it, then analyze the highest up voted AI and "organic" responses, and feed that back into the model. Rinse/repeat
That's fair, it just seems like that if they're going down the list of problems looking for things they can do to make reddit a better place, it doesn't make sense to not start at the top.
"Better for who?" is the question you need to ask yourself, because it's absolutely not the users anymore.
Yep, entirely fair. S'why I left.
I got banned from reddit for a few days once because I posted something similar. Was told I was threatening violence. Lol
Like a war on terrorism, that then fights domestic terrorists, that then protects Tesla; any new power will inevitably be abused. Snowden taught us that a long time ago.
Violence for the sake of violence is not the same as violence to stop violence. Everyone knows killing an abusive parent is morally grey whereas killing an innocent child is absolutely wrong.
I recently got a comment removed on the Fed because a mod misunderstood my comment. They thought that someone who maliciously harms the innocent is themselves innocent, therefore invalidating my ideal. My bet is they didn't know what malice means, or they genuinely think that hurting people with no provocation doesn't make you a bad person.
Everyone has their own reasons. If you disagree with their management, then you should celebrate other people choosing to leave, even if for different reasons than your own.
I'm not complaining about people leaving, just saying the bots are not the biggest problem.
Por que, no los dos?
I mean it's definitely both, but the fashy admins were the last straw.
What and destroy 90% of their traffic?!?
“That’s a bold move, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for ’em.”
AI bots.
Not the rest of them.
Yeah the manual bots are ok (humans?) I guess
This has nothing to do with bots. Verification comes with more info provided on your part, which they will sell.
I got ecchi dolls (China knockoff, cheaper but decent) from a site called OtakuCrate once, they've emailed me to confirm that the R18 loot is back under new US regulations, which means future orders just require your legal identification. I live in Europe, so there's no damn way I'm conforming to any privacy-invasive law, and I'm also not stupid.
It can be both. Reddit has a history of fabricating conversations. The way they sell advertising implies a certain level of engagement from their user base which can lead to bots pushing products in the form of reviews or by mention.
I think it's worth noting that Reddit, at one time, did have third party bot protection; however, it only protected their advertising. I can only imagine what the rest of their traffic looks like, but I would not be surprised if they were using bots of their own.
Like you said, they can make some money selling your information but they can also control the narrative how they choose.
And they'll be able to hand over to the government on demand when you say something the government doesn't like. They started all this during the previous administration, when the government were pressuring all social media companies to push their agenda and censor things they didn't like. X changed course, Facebook has now changed course, but Reddit is staying the course and will do whatever the government of the day tells them to.
Lol, they're the ones using the bots to fake engagement in the first place.
I Think Thies weil continue to work. Only foreign bots are exkulpiert.
Hah, yeah. One could say it's a form of digital nepotism.
"Only our bots get go work here!"
Like "closing the gate after the sheep already escaped", but in reverse?
like: Closed the gate after the wolf got in?
Closing the gate after the wolves have got in eaten all the sheep, had a nice rest, and then left. And then about 30 years past.
Sure maybe small trees are now growing in the now ungrazed pasture, but I guess late is better than never.
Unauthorized AI bots
100%. Reddit loves bots that they control, like the ones that go back and constantly re-post years old top rated, traffic driving content, complete with a replica of the entire comment section posted by hundreds/thousands of bots, because they can use it to do their bidding in pushing agendas and/or driving traffic/engagement.
Am I overreacting aita and all of those question answer subs are all bots.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Reddit worked with OpenAI and Google and other AI companies to help them get the data they want by letting them manipulate subs.
Too little, too late
what about their own Ai bots lmao?
*reddit will tag their own chatgpt bots to prevent them from being banned, and then through false positives will ban the last of the real users from the site.
i bet they also ignore half of the propaganda bots to look fair in thier moderations. the only signicant bannings we see is actual users, and the low hanging fruits, of and people posting links to thier businesses.
I don't believe that for 1 millisecond.
Spez won't be able to stop himself from enshitifying reddit in any way he can to appease those VC pump&dump scammers he's spent the last decade ruining reddit for.
Fuck reddit, It's a shithole.
Sometimes I have to return for various reasons. God. Some of them have absolutely bled over to the fediverse, but holy HELL are the people and the culture there messed up. I don't know if it's getting worse or I'm healing.
Personally I feel like I am healing. I haven't signed into reddit since they bent the knee to musk. I have noticed that I have become less toxic. I still go off half cocked like an idiot but I have been more tactful about it. I hope to keep working on it because I honestly never noticed until I had been away from reddit for a few weeks.
What did I miss here? Reddit hates musk.....
Spez doesn't
How did they bend the knee to musk is what I’m asking.
Started banning everyone who says mean things about Tesla and musk. Banned whole subreddits for him.
Edit: oh it’s fucking you, of course it fucking is. How much they paying you?
Source please
What's the difference between Reddit and Lemmy culturally? I thought that the people who moved over here held opinions fairly typical of Reddit.
Hmm... Reddit users tend to be less thoughtful and more ready to play to the crowd, as opposed to a more personal approach on lemmy/fediverse. It's an important distinction, that lemmy is based on the idea of being nice to people. By doing so, I hope to, and have seen, far less one-liners and dismissive jokes. It's less toxic imo. It's not perfect, but we have to work in steps, together as a society in order to get to enlightenment like that. And lemmy is a decent step away from what Reddit culture has become.
Also, I think lemmy people are a bit less selfish and more socialist as an average, which probably contributes. I think it helps to go, "capitalism bad, let me actually try to take a step away from that and try to do (at least technologically) something that's better." Personally, I'm not a communist or pure socialist, but I'm definitely not gruntled by any means with our current socioeconomic systems. I've talked to some tankie friends irl and not only do we disagree a on some things, but one person believed that what I want doesn't exist/isn't a known societal structure, which is fine to me, that just means we haven't tried it yet.
While I completely agree with you about the absence of one-liners and meme comments, and even more left leaning community, there's still that strong element of "gotcha" in discussions. Also tonnes of people not reading an article before commenting (at a better rate than Reddit probably), and a generally even more doomer attitude is common here.
Oh no! Anyway
Reddit: User content belongs to us. You can't scrape, collect, use, or have bots interact with it... unless you pay us.
Also reddalso Reddit: since all users have left, most of our traffic now consists of posts from AI bots that we're really really blocking!!
Lemmy is the same in terms of ownership btw, as is pretty much every online platform. Anything you post is owned by the owner of the instance that it is on and that it federates to. You don't own it.
I dare you to compare the largest possible instance vs Reddit as a whole.
I don't think you understood my comment.
Don’t think they’re doing this out of the goodness of the hearts, they’re just trying to avoid the “shit in, shit out” affect of their data sample.
Too late ~
"Drink verification can to continue"
They’re doing this to better identify you
The bots post better comments than most of their users.
Someone could create a forum for bots to discuss with each other. Call it Redbit. The bot could generate every possible questuon to ask and even steal questions from quora, reddit, Xitter, and every other forum, various AI bots can then reply to those questions with the best replies.
It can help put reddit out of business. Since most people are just looking for answers when they search google and get a reddit hit, most people don't even bother to sign for reddit and etc.
That was just /r/subredditsimulator
we should make an instance that's just bots talking to each other
Today one said they brought shame to their family line by having a giant tattoo on their wrist of an ex (who was actually dead). Boyfriend just now noticed said tattoo after a year. Picture looked like every letter of the tattoo was in a random healing stage and they were standing on a tire with a random toe censored.
It’s bad over there.
I always get 'Blocked by Network security' for trying to access Reddit from a VPN
If only they accepted the reality of massive residential proxy networks..
A shitton of apps not only sell your data but also use your device as a tunnel.
the users that posts links,a re using rotating mobile proxies, plus other sophisticated methods to hide thier browsers.
Yeah they've blocked VPNs because they want to be able to know exactly who their users are. They don't want anonymous anymore.
No they wont. Just those who haven't paid them first.
Suuuurrrre they will...
step one: ban everyone who writes an emdash
I like em dashes. I learned the alt code for en and em dashes just so I could use them easily on a computer. There is a difference between a hypen and an en dash, and a double-hyphen is but a simulacrum of the em dash!
But let's be real, I type kinda formally, like an AI, sooo
I am not convinced. Sending you to the crypto mines where all AI belong. See you in ten thousand years.
Oh no, the mines will be so bad for my authentic supple human skin, and my favourite mammilian activity of breathing air
I love em dashes. Fuck AI.
What, like Xitter did?
It's already happening, I see I opened accounts but none of my comment gets posted with accounts I don't know why , this is with new accounts
Same happened to me, all my old accounts which I had for years got banned for no reason and new accounts gets banned as soon as I comment.
Your IP address/device fingerprint has been blacklisted. They do daily (possibly a few times throughout the day) automated bans of any accounts that visit the site from IPs of users they have banned. Commenting automatically triggers an IP check so you're banned instantly, but if you didn't even comment your account would be banned by the end of the day.
I tested this after I wiped and deleted my accounts back when they made all the API changes. They undeleted my account, undeleted all of my posts, and then permanently banned my account. I then signed in to one of my alt accounts that has never commented to see if they had banned it, and they hadn't - until a few hours later when it was permanently banned for "ban evasion". I created a new account to see what would happen - same thing. I then turned on the built in VPN on a browser and set it to always be active when on reddits domain and made a new account, and that account to this day is still not banned.
That's a shadowban
sounds like you got shadowbanned, you can check your username, by not logging in and click your profile.
it usually says "cannot find profile" on a browser, which means shadowbanned.
Bots are all “f spez, I’m switching to lemmy!” Ever relatable, they are!
http://msgbrd.42web.io/7645238/index.php
No register nor login, anonymity allowed. Messages having no date. The perfect place to publish one's intimate thoughts, dreams, fears, fantasies.
@StephaneF
No TLS..
@themachinestops
are you afraid a NSA agent reads your wet dreams or your favourite bands list ?