Spez (Reddit CEO) just put out an announcement talking about how they'll verify bots vs humans. Get ready for a wave of new users into the Fediverse pretty soon!
https://www.reddit.com/user/spez/comments/1s3ezrc/humans_welcome_bots_must_wear_name_tags/?share_id=bqCX3C7abW339ipl8aFZlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world852
Comments317
That sounds tempting, but still won't make me rejoin reddit.
The only way I'll ever rejoin Reddit is if they fire that piece of shit, Spez, and every other piece of shit who had a hand in the monetization of their API access which destroyed third party apps like Apollo; and if they change that monetization, either making it free or making it so you have to be a paid Reddit subscriber to have expanded API access.
They did the whole thing with their API completely backwards, on purpose, to shut out the third party apps -- when they could have still been able to make money by doing it properly and not alienating a lot of their userbase.
And now that Reddit is effectively a right-wing cesspool of lies and bullshit, just like Twitter has become, even if they fix what they broke, it may not be worth rejoining.
Isn't that what they're doing? I've used Relay Pro via API until recently by paying for it.
The only reason I don't use that anymore is cause I went de-googled, so no play store subscription and thus no API access anymore, and since I can't stand the original app I came here.
They made the prices so insane that most 3rd party apps couldn't justify the higher subscription price
No, they made the third party app developers pay the license fees, not the users. If they changed that since I left, then that I'm ignorant of. It made zero sense to force payment from the developers and every sense to simply create a two-tiered API where maybe only a read-only front page works (no commenting) unless you're a paid subscriber to Reddit, which could be available via an authorization scheme on the logged-in user. It's simple to do. But they decided (at the time) to screw over the third party developers directly by forcing them to pay.
Thing is, even Christian (the guy who made Apollo) said a nominal fee makes sense and he would have been fine paying that, but he would have had to pay literal millions of dollars within like a month's notice in order to keep going, and have to pass that exorbitant cost onto his users who ALREADY paid him for yearly subscriptions/etc.
Simply put: Reddit should only have charged users directly, via subscription to Reddit, in order to use a fully-featured API irrespective of which client they use it through.
Spez is a greedy piece of garbage.
Hmm, it's truly not ideal, but while I certainly don't want to defend them (just playing devil's advocate a bit here lol), IMO application-based payments do make more sense than user-based. I assume way more people use more than 1 account than there are people who use more than 1 client. If that assumption is correct, the current system is very much in favor of the majority of users.
But it's indeed a bad solution for the 3rd party app devs to act as some kind of middleman for the payments. The only better alternative I can think of would've been to let users add their alts to their subscription, but that would need a system to detect and punish shared subscriptions.
That the fees are too high might be true, I don't have any insight on that - but Relay Pro has tiers from (in Germany) €1.09 to €5.49 (+ optional higher tiers for application support), the 5.49 tier being with unlimited API calls.
This surely isn't cheap, at least in the category of social media apps, which is 99% free (but usually ad-supported, which Relay isn't), but not unfeasible. Generally speaking, i.e. regardless of category, ad-free usage (which is what API access is from reddits perspective) for €5.50 is actually cheap. Most apps and services charge around the same or more for that.
That being said, I was obviously not in favor of that change either. And Reddit sucks at communicating what specifically they're gonna do. But I also gotta say, the way it turned out in the end wasn't too bad/unfair - at least not in my experience as a paying API user. Might be (and probably is) a different story for the developers, as the amount of shut-down 3rd party apps indicates. Reddit should've just worked out something together with these devs, then I'm sure the backlash and outrage wouldn't have been half as large.
Either way, I'm happy to be here now.
Well, I suppose with my suggestion, which in my view is the correct path they should have taken, any alt account would also have to be a paid subscriber to Reddit if they wanted to access the full API with that account. I don’t really see much justification to support alt accounts on the same subscription.
And you hit the nail on the head about Reddit trying to make the third party app developers be payment middlemen. It made zero sense to me if it wasn’t for greed or to squeeze out those app developers so they could force their user base to their own mobile application which was considerably inferior at the time, but allowed Reddit to show advertisements.
It was apparent to me that they did this to make their impending IPO more appealing to potential investors because it shows that “line goes up” — which is the only thing investors care about and why the enshittification of good things always happens.
If you can feel my bitterness, it’s because I deleted my 15-year Reddit account in July 2023 that had a couple of posts during the account lifetime that made it to the front page. Which, for a nobody like me, was kind-of cool. However, while I’m not over Spez being a greedy piece of crap, I am quite over being on Reddit and, like you, am very happy to be a part of the Fediverse!
Why did you leave in the first place?
fitting translation for "meta"
When I read "log factory" I was thinking of Splunk or something similar. I'm tired.
Yes. Spelunking in the log factory.
Funny how this ties nicely into Meta’s lobbying for age verification and how it’s suddenly a conversation we keep seeing crop up. The pattern recognition tools in my brain see nothing but constant red flags these days.
They flooded the web with bots, advertisers are backing out because of it, and now both Spez and Zuck are panicking.
I'm totally with you, I would also add that recently meta said that they wanted to add facial recognition to their "smart" glasses.
they said that "We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns"
Source:
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/13/meta-plans-to-add-facial-recognition-to-its-smart-glasses-report-claims/
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-facial-recognition-distracted-2026-2?op=1
They flooded it with bots, what do you mean?
I think like Bitcoins creation hardwares technological advancement made it inevitable. Google made the tech, basic AI research, which became modern AI when they threw more compute at it.
Bitcoin was made inevitable by the Great Financial Crisis, not by hardware advancement. Its proof-of-work is based on hashcash from the 1990s. The computing power spent is arbitrary, a consequence of its creator underestimating how quickly Bitcoin would catch on.
Well I think it was the hardware crypto implementation that allowed it, as you could check cryptographic keys far faster, which is what creates the gate.
But thats the easy part! It's expensive to produce and cheap to verify.
Its cheap to verify due to dedicated cryptographic hardware baked into modern CPU.
IIRC those weren't widespread until after Bitcoin was invented.
Ooh, yay! I just swung over myself after my eighth account permaban (with no link to alleged offending comment) within 24 hours of posting about how one of the admins is in regular contact with Ghislaine Maxwell while she's in prison🤔
It's funny how they don't show you the comment.
I just got permabanned within a minute or so of posting something like "The only way to get Trump out of office is for 100,000 people to drag him out.". Appeal denied even though I said it was hyperbole.
I still like the sheer volume of content on Reddit but they are getting worse all the time.
I don't think this should be an hyperbole. Get to work, now.
The only good Trump is a dead Trump. Wonder if I will get banned for saying that? Curious since I just migrated here from reddit after getting banned for expressing such sentiments.
only the diet-reddit lemmy instances might do that; but i would like to believe that not even they are that red pilled.
I got banned from here as well for saying verified facts with evidence. Its all the admins discretion in the end, and they're political.
Have you considered a more reasonable instance? I used to be on .world myself. Used to...
Check their modlog, they were banned for being a bigot.
You have a link to this administrator of Reddit being in contact with Maxwell? Inquiring minds want to know
A Google search later and here we are:
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/r45a5n/here_is_the_evidence_that_reddit_user_maxwellhill/
Haven't read this thread specifically but I see it's four years old. Plenty of goings on by the Internet sleuths since then. Believe /r/Epstein is where a lot of where I read was? May have to do some archive digging, since my accounts have been fully nuked just for mentioning this information, with absolutely no links provided by myself. Can't imagine the threads are all surviving it as well.
Posts in the sub are a non-starter. The maxwellhill thing was debunked when it was pointed out that the account was active when Ghislaine was attending well publicized events. You guys are falling for right wing bullshit.
Yeah... I had a 3 year account had been suspended a couple times for "suspensious activity" which I chalked up to my use of a VPN, multiple OSs, and still browsing mobile with RIF and revanced. Normally I just had to change my PW and refresh RIF but this last time when I did that I kept getting a login error no matter how many times I reset it. Turns out even though it still knee was email to send the requests too the account was like fully nuked. Everything is just gone.
There are so many ways to do human verification that have worked for years. The biggest reason bots are plaguing the internet is because these corpos don't really try anymore. There's literally no reason to do face scans or IDs other than to unanonymize people and take their data.
Name one way
How about at a random interval once every couple months it will ask you to draw a picture of a cat in the browser and if it finds your drawing process too similar or the image too similar to one that's already in the database it will flag it without telling you. Three strikes and your out kinda rule. It's like drug tests but for the internet.
Even if you did, like, a line across the screen to save time there's no way in hell it'd be the same as anything else in that database unless you are extremely unlucky.
So you are suggesting captchas? I used to make a living running a bot farm and whenever my bots would be promoted with a captcha I'd have it solved by a service like 2captcha for the low cost of 0.3cents per captcha
Kinda, yeah. I was trying to come up with a captcha that's hard for a bot but incredibly easy for a human. The random intervals was to make it harder to automate and that's the idea I had off the top of my head. I just feel like captchas have had wasted potential for years and people kinda gave up on improving them.
Captchas back in the day were solved by humans in bot farms. Yes they are humans but not the right ones.
That was kinda my idea with the whole random and unexpected checking in. It's easy to get humans to do it for bot farms when you have deterministic times in which you'd have to perform the captcha. Nowadays most simple captchas can be done by bots so I was brainstorming a way you could make it harder for the bots while being minimally intrusive to the user.
Sorry dude, but this comment makes it clear you have no idea what you're talking about. If I'm given an assignment to write a program that generates a huge variety of novel cat drawings, which won't register the same in this database, I bet I could personally single handedly have that done in a week of work.
Some other problems :
Many real humans will draw roughly similar cats. Unless you compare the drawings pixel by pixel, or very precisely, then there will be lots of false positives.
If you then decide to compare the drawings pixel by pixel or very precisely, then I can trivially generate new drawings by altering them. I have plenty of time to reverse engineer how your database is comparing things even though you don't tell me when I get a strike because I can make lots of fake accounts via hiding my IP address and run experiments by feeding different variations of drawings and seeing which ones eventually get banned.
If you ask once every couple of months, then my bot gets to do three times whatever that duration of months is worth of damage and misinformation before it gets banned. That's a pretty long time, especially for a bot. I can deploy new bots much faster than your system gets rid of them.
As Anivia pointed out, I can pay real humans to draw the different cats for my bots when needed. This is especially trivial because I can just ask them to draw a whole bunch of cats in advance. I don't even need to wait for the cue from the system. I can just have a big library of pre-drawn cat drawings that I upload as needed.
Cool, you don't have to be a dick about it. :P I already know that I don't know much about but I wanted to make a suggestion because the guy asked.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be a dick, just being honest. I felt it was important to correct your unjustified confidence in the original comment where you claimed many such solutions exist
But why do you need to talk down to me like I'm an idiot instead of just correct me politely? I'm genuinely curious because it seems to be a very common thing nowadays where percieved confident incorrectness and ignorance is met with distain and anger. I didn't mean to offend anyone when I made this comment and was simply brainstorming while bored at work.
Let me first clarify that I think you seem very nice and I'm not mad at you, nor do I have any intent to make you feel bad. I think you're misreading my tone, tbh. That or I'm expressing my tone poorly.
So, I thought I did correct you politely, within the bounds of also needing to make very clear and unambiguous that you needed to adjust your confidence when talking about this subject. I have no issue with someone idly brainstorming ideas, but in the context of your original comment "There are so many ways to do human verification that have worked for years.", which you didn't qualify in any way, you sounded completely authoritative and sure of yourself. Since you yourself even know that you are ignorant on this topic, to me a better phrasing would be to preface that with something like "I think..." Or "It seems like...", or even outright saying "I don't really know about this stuff, but..." Etc.
Because you made a dumb claim with confidence. You were talked down to because you were acting like a fool. Which you're still doing btw.
Speak to a customer service agent while they ask you a few timed-dated questions
Video chat with a customer service agent.
if it's a real name account:
Small credit card charge to a card in your name.
provide a scan of a utility bill
provide a scan of a car title
All of Those are a deal breaker for me.
if all forms of verification are deal breakers, we either need to get laws made to make it unlawful, or we need to boycot services that require it.
The government is still going to do whatever it wants, and they already mishandle all your data.
Boycott, get around, defy, deny depose.
People forget that glass bottles and gasoline are (relatively) inexpensive
That's why the stuck Iran, to close the straight and make gas more expensive ;)
I don't think we have enough gumption to actually do it, but here's to hoping.
Deny, defy, depose..
I could see the first one, if it all takes place in a chatbox. Like, they have someone talk to you in chat for a few minutes to verify if you pass the turing test, then randomly once a month do it again.
With the proper setup that would be acceptable.
Unfortunately they would have to pay people to do it so probably never happen. Although seeing them try to implement an LLM to try to tell if humans pass the Turing test would be kind of hilarious.
An llm doing it is not acceptable I do not think.
As we all know, they are completely full of shit here, they allow and encourage the majority of the bots on their platforms because it inflates their numbers.
As such any system they set up will not be trustworthy in this regard.
So instead of face scans or giving them my ID I have a video call with them and give them access to all my sensitive data? Am I missing something here?
all what sensitive data?
You don't consider your credit card information sensitive data?
Not when you can generally make a 1 time use card, or a "virtual" card that most brands offer. Granted the only places I've seen this type of verification used is where you're going to buy something anyways.
I give it to a dozen different vendors a month. It's sitting in probably 20 vendors on the web right now just waiting for me to pay with it. I tell it to people over the phone. Giving it as a small charge, verification is the least of my worries.
Place age-verification on routers and keep it there.
Just open it all up to everyone. Fuck it. There's a point we all just get bored of it
Wait, the guy at the top of the chain asked human verification, not age verification...
Any verification is wrong. Like everything in life, it will only impose a restriction on people who don't have the ability to circumvent it at best. The only reason this would go forward is if it can be used against those people somehow. Data collection. Censorship.
Need to go the other way. Lean in not away. Look at why bots exist. Find ways to jam that system up. Like if it's a bot trying to promote a new movie. Every comment should be shitting on that movie. If it's a bot in November trying to post the latest drop ship night light star projector on r/coolstufftotallynotjustads well I'm pretty sure my cousin bought that lamp and was the reason his house burned down. For a couple years let's fuck it all up. Make the internet inhospitable to politics, business, advertisers. If it's some racist Facebook group, they pay ads to promote their bot group, so post it here on lemmy and report spam the group since they use bots to moderate. Chase them the fuck out. If they try to stop us it'll cost them millions and us nothing to find new ways. Their option is to either restrict us to the point their platforms suck or they have to increase the number of bots costing them more and more and more until it's not worth it. Go to fucking war with them and take the internet back instead of going the route of giving DNA samples to some 3rd party owned by meta just to look at porn.
I don't know. I'm just done with it all. I like to image a world 20 years ago where we all saw the internet moving towards corporate interest and we chased them out. Instead they now create a problem and sell the solution and we all clap and fucking cheer
Hitler was much easier to kill as a baby. That's all.
After I posted this I came across a topic that is likely filled with bots pumping it. Get in early. Look for indicators. Tag and bag them. But there's needs to be some type of community for this. Like a scambaiters
"Famous Influencer Druski under flame for doing "Whiteface" after a video of him making fun of Erika Kirk surfaced online.."
Let's be honest. The fediverse will also have a huge bot problem soon. We kind of have this right now, but if you look a little bit further in the future, when we maybe come a little bit more relevant, spammers and scammers and all those propagandists will also come here. I suspect that they're already here.
Currently we have no protection at all. You can setup an instance, federate and start with your federated vote manipulation. Our human moderators can't keep up with bots posting spam to their community and we are totally helpless against LLM bots pushing some agenda.
Yup. Conspiracy theories aside, the bot problem is an actual hard problem to solve.
Agree, hard indeed. Any solution will have problems. False positives. False negatves. Violating privacy.
So far, maybe Lemmy flew under the radar and it's a nice enough place. But I don't see how that can continue longterm.
It is sad to me. Anything nice eventually gets ruined.
There's a boiling point to almost everything, and lemmy trying to be an umbrella of communities rather than topic-specific, good old forums is the crux. When you narrow completely down and focus on one main, maybe 2 adjacent topics, and the rest is piled into off-topic board - it's stupidly easy to ID bots.
Team Fortress 2 players reliving their PTSD trauma with your comment
we have tools like defederating any instance filled with bots but we definitely need more
How would that help? Bots will just move to another instance. Maybe yours.
I mean it literally helps to defederate an instance overrun by bots because that means no one is taking care of banning them and manually review sign-ups, so you defend your instance of that spam/slop.
The best part is that defederation is not final so when that instance is finally healthy again it can be federated.
I think people here are missing the difference between reddit and any instance on the fediverse. Every instance admin has the power to control their federation and it is in their best interest to review sign-ups to a certain degree. Unlike reddit there is no urge to fill the site with 'users' to inflate numbers and sell ads.
I've actually been wondering about that - if your site is predominantly there to cash in from ads, but you ban the vast majority of real users and then inject 2/3 of the entire population with bots......who is even left to pump those ad views? Google Ads knows when its a fake view and bots dont scroll through.
The only thing I miss from reddit is my favorite small niche subs.
Invisible bicycles.
Where people take photos of people on bicycles and Photoshop out the bicycle. You can request or do the edits.
Forbiddensnacks
Photos of stuff that looks like delicious food but is not food.
There was another with short videos of animals in sync. Like chickens or dogs .
Oh and another that was photos of cats, sitting on clear glass. The photos were from the underside.
There was another photoshop battle one. Where there was a prompt and then everyone would submit a photoshopped mash of the prompt.
But I bet AI has ruined that one.
What is this. People posted pictures of stuff that the community tried to figure out what it was
Retro futurism. Just posts about that.
I think I miss forbidden snacks the most.
Im also someone with a million hobbies. So I really miss those. Some are here too. Bigger ones like 3d printing and photography but not stained glass. Not sure if there is one for Blender. I should check.
Subs for specific games like remedy games, zelda. Animal crossing.
Honestly I'm from the time where there used to be forums for these things and I liked forums just fine.
I get that smaller population means less niche communities.
I'm okay with it. But I will be honest and say I miss my niche indie subs. I hate that it's been ruined. And that it's dead.
Facebook groups still exist though and many are acceptable. Especially for the indie games and hobbies.
my little hometown somehow had a subreddit. i don't know how
The good news is that if the fediverse gets an influx of Redditors, maybe we'll see some of those niches pop up here too. Reddit's impending identity theft coupled with the insane enforcement of rule 1 they've been doing lately is what got me to make my account here.
I miss r/fitness. It was big enough but good enough to learn a lot and get motivation.
I miss the TV episode discussions. Even if I wasn't following live, I could go read the thread and feel the shared excitement and read the theories and there was always something I hadn't noticed that someone else had.
I miss those the most.
Same. I admit I circled back recently purely for the hype of Hazbin Season 2.
Fortunately, this season was shit so I didn't spend long on there this time lol
Yeah I also liked the show subs where people theorized and discussed details.
Same style of stuff I miss. Mainly instrument related subreddits, books, and boutique blu-rays. However I don’t miss Reddit itself at all. Especially with how right wing brain rot it became. It felt like hanging out in a Facebook comments section.
Same. I think it we moved back to forums the internet experience would improve
Agree. Another benefit is, it's much less productive to use info-warfare bots against a small forum of let's say 500 users, than against a global site with 1B users.
Yeah I think big hubs are too problematic.
In my infant span of figuring out how to get on here, there are some charms here like foodporn being on the main server, and shittyfoodporn being exclusively on the Canadian one.
Okay that's pretty funny
Similar vein to forbidden snacks was don't put your dick in that. Yeah I miss the niche subs too, don't miss the rest of the bullshit tho.
E. Ask historians was also high grade.
I wish there was a more active general gaming community here. I just migrated over from reddit, and haven't found one that isn't a ghost town.
Exactly. For me it was Cats (all animals, really) and Guitars.
Political discussions are far better on Lemmy.
So what's will happen to their existing bot accounts? Erase 75% of their current users?
Replace with their own bots and paying customers' bots.
Lmao hopefully
I was waiting for this move, it was the final straw. now I'm here, happily writing a comment in the fediverse through blorp (foss).
Blorp dev here. Let me know if there is anything I can do to make the app even better for you!
This is one of the things I love. Talk about something you like, creator shows up. Wholesome.
Keep it up, you're awesome!
The app is fantastic first off, my only issue is randomly the comments just don't load, despite good connection and posts loading fine, but force stopping and reopening the app fixes it so idk. But def still my fav Lemmy app
The F-Droid maintainers added that. It’s probably my fault for not explaining my app well. At the time, I just really wanted to get Blorp on F-Droid, so I didn’t make any sort of argument against the anti feature labels. After that, my focus was mainly on improving the app itself, and I never went back to ask them to change it.
But you’re not the first person to mention this. I should probably fix it.
hey, nice to meet you here! I was wondering if it's a problem that only I have or if it's still in development but I have issues playing videos inside blorp. Could you please help? I really like blorp's UI and I don't want to change.
Nice to meet you too! Could you be more specific? Which type of video are you trying to play? If you're unsure, could you send me a link to the post? Either here of via private message.
Video playback could definitely be improved in general, though it's a bit tough because there are like 5 different types of video embeds and they all work a little different.
for example, I tried to play this video but it didn't work.
not sure if the problem is on my side or not.
https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.world/post/44647866
EDIT: I forgot to thank you for your help and time, it's nice to see devs so dedicated to their projects
Found the issue. Good catch! Will fix in the next release.
THANKS, I'll update as soon as possible.
They should start with all the commenters in the thread praising the Spez.
Every other website:
Websites should copy VKontakte and make the user line-up several words in Cyrillic. It's the hardest one I've ever had to pass, it has to be exactly in the right place 😂
Like a sliding puzzle from Hell.
Doesn't that make it a bad test? It should be easy for humans and hard for machines.
It's going to get to the point where anything easy for humans will be easy for machines too.
Or Cloudflare.
I'm not sure I understand how cloud flare is supposed to help? It clearly doesn't actually work. My Arr stack has an automated cloud flare bypass that seems to have a decent success rate.
It's best to use something else like Hcaptcha passive or FPJS Pro alongside it.
I think people should experience smaller communities, they are often much higher quality in terms of the actual social interactions (though, we're starting to get our share of trolls and toxic people).
I think there was a big shift for reddit in 2016 after they bought (and then shut down..) AlienBlue and then launch their official app. That moment it felt like when the number of users just exploded, but with that, the quality of posts (and average age of the user) dropped.
Lemmy/the fediverse reminds me of 2010-2015 reddit (which is a good thing!)
I remember when Reddit was run out of spez's Somerville apartment on a little PC. No subreddits, just one top page. Terrible performance and no users. Everyone was at either Slashdot or Digg. Even Kuro5hin by then was dead. Reddit beat Digg because Digg got stupid and abused their community. Reddit is a million times worse now than Digg ever was.
Yup! I was a part of the mass Digg exodus.
I figured that would happen again with reddit, but to my disappointment the internet is a much different place than it used to be.
There was a competitor of Digg to flee to. Reddit, and the other social media platforms, solved that problem with anticompetitive practices to prevent a migration they previously benefitted from.
Agreed. I remember leaving MySpace for Facebook (shit I even remember Xanga before MySpace).
At some point, it felt like the internet just got smaller, became 5 websites. And on those 5 websites, you'd find something like: a picture of a tweet posted to reddit and the tweet is about an instagram post"
Really disheartening as someone who came up with the "wild west" internet (which definitely had its issues, but it felt like human issues, not corporate issues)
What anticompetitive practices? I figure it is more just a matter of userbase inertia: they already have the huge user base, so other forum user bases are small which makes people not want to migrate there.
Back when Reddit was funny and not a bot hive
I remember /r/AskReddit being THE spot, and it was great to read on the go since it was just text. All the novelty accounts were awesome, RamblesOffTopic being a favorite of mine haha.
...and r/conspiracy was 80% stuff like birds ain't real and the rest I always assumed was people posting ironically... now I'm not so sure that that was an accurate assessment.
and r/F7U12. It wasn't just a meme it was an entire meme language, kids these days with their gifs and their template sites... smhing my head
I use user tags pretty heavily, and it is amazing how small Lemmy truly is. I recognize a lot of individual users, and the tag even links back ti whatever post/comment I originally used to tag them.
That's how the OG Internet communities were. There would be like 500 total people maybe and you'd see them randomly throughout the week as they were online. You don't know everyone but you recognize most of the names/pfps.
It cuts down on a lot of toxicity when you can actually know who is a jerk and who is probably just having a bad day. It makes the community a bit more empathic and less reactionary.
Indeed!!
As a side tangent, I used to get so mad on old forums when someone would update their avatar lol I didn't recognize names, I recognized their picture. So if they changed they might as well be a new user until I recognized we've spoken before, haha.
I know! I paid an artist, from the forums, to draw my avatar and paid them to update it for holidays and stuff so it was consistent.
Also, you gotta have a good signature. Why not a live updating image of what is playing in your media player, that could not possibly end badly.
Are you getting user tags from a third-party Lemmy app? I don't see that feature in the web interface.
I think they must be - though I can't figure out which one, haha.
I can't figure out how to do it via the website, or Voyager / Mlem on iOS.
In Voyager, you need to enable the feature under Settings -> User Tags.
Voyager implements it entirely on the client; it’s not a feature of Lemmy. Therefore it isn’t available via the Lemmy website.
However, PieFed does have backend support for user tagging. On a PieFed account, you can tag users through the website or through Mlem.
Guy, never forget that internet was built for porn and sarcasm, later renamed trolling, and you're supposed to have higher than room temperature IQ to be here and properly enjoy it.
You have to read between the lines. This just gives them the option to label anybody they want as a "bot" with virtually no way to challenge them. They can now ban anybody they wish for posting content they don't agree with (pro-gaza, anti-israel, anti-capitalist, etc).
They already ban anybody they wish without recourse or actionable means to challenge them.
-Reddit Refuge banned for life for being critical of the fascist state of Israel.
I got banned after 15 years for being pro-choice.
It's sort of bittersweet (more sweet though, as the past few years the site has just been miserable for me), but I'm sort of proud I went out standing up for women's rights.
It was a 14 year account when I got banned, so yeah pretty much same sad boat. I do miss certain specialized specific subreddits.
Just to be clear... you think that the thing they've been actively doing for years, without any indication that there's any motivation to change, is why they're changing policy? 🤔 let's just say I'm not convinced
They might be wanting to branch out to banning for protected reasons. They would need a handy excuse for that to avoid lawsuits.
I wonder if we will actually ever see the true numbers, I have a feeling they will realize that SOOOOOOOOOOO many of the users are bots and be forced to pull a shwitter.
We will see what happens, but I won't hold my breath for actual transparency.
I don't think they give a shit about bots, as it inflates their traffic numbers and gives the illusion of a more robust user base. This is about gathering your data. They want to know who you are for marketing and other purposes.
Clearly yes.
agreed, although my concern is that the proportion of users to bots may be much higher than expected (like shwitter).
How much are advertisers willing to pay to advertise to bots? Not much I'm guessing, I envision lies.
Lol, no. That would hurt their stock price
I've been thinking of creating a new account through Tor, so that I could reconnect with my former communities who are still active there since, unfortunately, Reddit is still bigger than Lemmy. But with this new stupid identity verification rule from Reddit, I don't think I will come back to the site.
I guess I will recreate the communities I've been missing here in Lemmy instead, which I have been thinking of doing for a long while now.
Without bots their most popular text based subs like AITAH or TwoHotTakes would be empty.
Can't forget /r/worldnews which is literally just an israeli bot farm
They are not actually going to touch these bots. You are just clueless if you think they will remove their own propaganda tools.
"Am I The Asshole for doing what I want with my own life?"
99.99% of posts in that sub
or the overreacting sub: "my husband beat me to a pulp and set our cat on fire, am I overreacting for considering a divorce?"
Get ready for the tankies and other assholes to scare off all the new users again :D
Something tells me that won't end well for them.
Will reveal how much their population is bots.
Do you really think they will out their own astroturfing interests? They will only tell u who is a bit if they didn't want them in the site, not if they paid to be there !
5 more users. I assume that's the number of users still stupid enough to still be using reddit. I profoundly apologize to the stupid community who are not using reddit.
apology accepted
I wouldn't say users are stupid to still be using Reddit. There's still alot more activity there and alot of subs still haven't switched over yet. But if they start requiring identity verification, I think we'll see alot more switching. Right now, I do both to get the best of both worlds. If I have to give them my identity, they get cut out.
If Reddit loses all the bots, they will literally lose more than half of their activity, especially in an election year.
Sounds like a statement to say they have a hard-on-bots policy, but in practice it seems they won't care unless there's significant outcry against a particular account.
literally elon's twitter strategy
Remember how each time ANY new dating site and later app would actually gain decent traction, the owners would pump it full of fucking bot accounts on top of ignoring scammers making accounts just to milk male purses? Except dating apps have their predations set unlike these melting pots of doom scrolling excuses for forums.
And none of them will know about fediverse girl
Do you mean Anubis?
That uses POW which wastes time and CPU, however it does essentially nothing to stop bots, it just makes them slower.
You need to detect the fingerprints of things like Selenium and Multilogin as well as the fingerprint of the whole browser or device to truly stop them.
If I remember right her name was Nicole
For some reason, most of the responses welcome that decision!? I guess the others were banned.
Discord did the same thing didn't they?
Also reddit heavily used bots to fill they site with posts for years. They were one of the biggest ones. Kiss my ass reddit
While the corpos are stomping on their own feet, it turns out that doing nothing (i.e. just existing) is the best strategy to apply.
Now perhaps we’ll get more (hopefully) good folks onto Lemmy. Sure, Digg may get some too, but I’m not sure of its long-term privacy respectfulness - being subject to the US laws and all that.
Lol for those who missed it, the Digg reboot actually failed and shut down, and now they’re planning to reboot it again, this time repositioning it as “Digg for AI agents.”
Spez announces they won't tolerate competing astroturfing, only shareholder-approved bots will remain.
One more reason to be glad I left that shithole. Also, expect Redlib to finally be killed off soon.
they'll go to piefed; there's nothing to get ready for.
That's the neat part. The Fediverse doesn't eat itself; more activity on Piefed is more activity on Lemmy.
Lemmy, piefed, kbin, all valid and handy, tbh.
what's important is that people go to the fediverse, and also contribute every now and then to the devs and instance owners for hosting costs!
Piefed is here talking to you right now. It's all the same shit
Piefed does seem like a great alternative, but I'm in the "too good to be true" phase.
It has some anti-features that make it worse IMO, like the social credit score "feature," not to mention the right-wing and anti-communist views of the lead dev.
Though I'm new here, lots of communities rules are copypasta from breddit, so what's honestly different on here?
Can someone explain? Isn't removing bots actually a good thing?
They're selectively asking for verification to do it. That's mixed, because:
They'll only ask to verify "suspicious" accounts. So all the bots that "behave" are going to stay, which is what the bots will now optimize for.
Verification will become another form of selective enforcement. Say the wrong then, and you get either verify or get banned.
As for the methods, see for yourself:
Draw your own conclusion.
But my take? It's the worst of everything: Only the most primitive, obvious bots get banned. "Transparent," sycophantic bots will all stay on Reddit, and get even stealthier. Rebellious human users will get hit with verification, at the whim of whatever opaque algorithm determines they're "bot-like," which is a fantastic recipe for censorship without the appearance of doing so.
And this is all if you take Spez at his word. There's a lot of history suggesting you should not.
Passkeys? I don't understand how that verifies anything
Presumably because one needs a phone app or physical hardware (like a Yubikey) to use them.
I dunno. Shrug
Bitwarden supports them and you can use as many as you want
Jesus this Reddit post reeks of bootlickers. The comments sound sooooo artificial, hard to say if bootlickers or ironically bots programmed to praise and upvote this shitstorm.
I was scrolling down to find the obligatory “Fuck Spez” comments but got disappointed. Probably moderated heavily.
If they get rid of the bots, though, there won't be any more posts.
It's really weird to me how literally anything they say or do is immediately interpreted in the worst possible way here, on Lemmy.
Let's get real for a second.
Is there a bot problem on the Internet in general? That's a resounding "yes".
Do we want to do something about it?
According to OP - no, not at all.
I mean, if OP considers malicious everything that Spez listed, the only remaining course of action is inaction and hoping for the best.
You're right in theory, but it's Spez we're talking about. I tend to consider that the following is a rational reaction to Spez preparing to take any action about anything in any context:
There is a bot problem but ID checks are invasive, and you can stop the bots with things like Hcaptcha Passive and Turnstile which use POW to waste the CPU cycles of bots and look for signs of things like Selenium and Puppeteer controlling the browser.
Passkeys and hardware attestation are also good as they require a fingerprint or face and bare metal hardware instead of a VM, but Spez also wants to introduce things like the Worldcoin Orb and IDs as well which are too invasive IMO.
This is not ID checks.
FFS, do you guys just not understand a thing you're reading, or flat out refuse to read anything on Reddit?
Who says anything about ID checks or HCaptchas?
Well, it looks like they state three options:
Passkeys. This won't work over a medium term, period. It's tantamount to saying that SSH keys prove someone is human. If there's enough interest, they'll just make a software passkey solution that can work. Passkey being "human interactive" is purely a client-side construct.
Biometric services. Strictly speaking, not an ID but it's not hard to imagine leveraging capturing biometrics to an ID like scenario.
Government IDs. Well that's self explanatory.
They do state distancing themselves from the ID by trusting a third party service, but 3rd party ID service is still a thing.
Of course, this seems to be only after someone accuses you of being a bot and Reddit bothering to pay attention. Which may be almost no one.
Precisely. Any of the listed options is better than a captcha. None of the options are perfect, obviously, we're using yesterday's tech to solve a tomorrow's problem, but it's something, and it doesn't immediately mean "privacy online is dead".
I'd rather put up with a captcha than do any on those other things, especially if it was temporary. Or maybe they could do something like Anubis
Why would it be temporary?
One you prove your not a bot. Hopefully it work that way, but I suppose it may not
https://lemmy.ml/post/45007584/24779562
If it's a third party tool that does the verification, that's false.
What's the alternative?
Nobody on the Lemmy side is talking about fixing the AI problem. The only reason why you don't see a flood of LLM content is that we're too small for anyone to give enough of a shit. If we grow enough, we'll get flooded just like any other social media platform, and federation does nothing to protect us from this.
Require the big AI companies to embed watermarks with entirely free and private decoders, as well as use things like Hcaptcha passive and/or Turnstile on Lemmy and defederate from instances which don't implement them.
You have got to be joking, right?
"The solution to AI companies doing illegal shit is to ask them nicely to let us know when they're doing it". HCaptcha only works until it doesn't.
By "require" I mean it should by required by law, or at least an ESRB-style self policing organisation. It should be standard like watermarking on radio stations.
Mate, how does any of that help when you're up against literal cyber military units and propaganda farms financed by hostile governments?
Did you refuse to read a Reddit post, or fail to understand it?
Out of the three options Spez has mentioned, two guarantee privacy. The third is - and he mentions the pitfalls - the use of government issued e-IDs. This is problematic for obvious reasons, however - properly implemented - can also guarantee privacy.
Ironically the only thing that will ever work is identifying a user to a person in one form or another. Otherwise it's just a never ending arms race.
Yup! Which is why institutions that already handle identities (governments, banks, etc) should be involved.
The way I see it: an institution verifies your identity as a human and has your personal details (such as DoB). A tool (similar to, e.g. Sweden't BankID) is available to the user. When a website says "you must be 18 years old to access this", a QR code is generated. You scan the code with your tool, and agree to send only the information about whether or not you're an adult. Not the DoB, not anything else, just a token of "yup, adult". If a website has a strong anti-bot policy, same same goes for your "proof of human".
This can be set up in a way that guarantees the user's privacy (e.g. by just not storing any logs).
Yes but how does that prevent the authority, in this case a govenment, from being able to link the token that was used (QR code) back to what it was used for?
Depends on how you create it. It could be set up that your app talks to the website, and the identity provider, but the identity provider never talks to the website. As in: you get a token from the IP, store it locally, send it out to he website, the website confirms retrieval and logs you in, and then all the logs get purged on your device so they can't be retrieved.
The IP side would only see that someone has requested access to some of your data (e.g. proof of age, proof of human, maybe citizenship, if the content is region-locked), and that you have agreed to share it.
The website would only see the tokens of proof, but not who you actually are.
Ironically, the tech behind NFTs might be super helpful with this.
If I am understanding this correctly, I guess the only problem I see with that is both entities need to trust that the user is indeed being truthful and not sharing a token. I think a system with a neutral third part that takes a token from the identity provider and a token from the webite, validates them and sends a result. Or maybe that is what you said.
Yeah, that's essentially what I meant. The validation could happen much like with PGP keys and passwords.
"We can't let the terrorists win!!"
You'd really hand over your government ID to Spez? Lmao
Did you not read anything from the linked post, or did you fail to understand it?
Who says anything about government ID?
Did you read the announcement? This has nothing to do with identification.
its kinda funny. theoretically I would love for a system that can identify real humans but realistically im unwilling to submit to the type of trump it would entail.
We dont want those bots here either
Keep going /u/spez you fucking sell-out donkey.
This is pretty uncontroversial as far as reddit announcements go. They aren't requiring identity verification.
Should we do some advertising on Reddit for Lemmy? On one hand it's a good exodus wave, but on the other hand it always gets libbed up after a migration wave
Just agitate in communist and other anti-imperialist communities on reddit, not on reddit in general, for now. The liberals usually flock to Lemmy.world anyways, leftists tend to go to left instances like Hexbear.net or Lemmygrad.ml.
Accounts that are suspected of being bots would be required to verify.
Hopefully they will stop shadowbans as well, or at least delay disclosure of them to waste time and proxy data of bots without confusing humans.
New user here. Just approved and arrived. Greetings and salutations, folks 🙏🏻
Yay! Welcome new Fedi-frens!!
I actually read the announcement, and there's nothing controversial there. They delete 100k bot accounts daily.
Then why make the announcement?
You described their normal behavior, now they've made this announcement. Something must have changed.
investors getting nervous?
**PRESS RELEASE **
I have done some gardening this morning. I now intend to finish my cup of tea, take a shit, and play some computer games. My day off is proceeding normally. Further details to follow.
That's Facebook, not Reddit.
From the moment I heard about Facebook, I thought "I don't want to expose my stream of consciousness thoughts across the Internet, and I DEFINITELY don't want to follow anyone else's either."
It actually sounds like they are allowing bots as long as a human can intervene and is willing to verify their identity if their automated activity is detected. They are embracing slop users as long as they give them their data.
I think the main reason for the announcement, though, was to deal with the rumours that everyone will need to verify their identity (which this post seems to assume is still the case).
Personally, I'd rather see reddit remain the mainstream version of this just so that people who want to run bots for whatever reason have more reason to do it there than here. Because the commercial level ones will have more resources than lemmy admins will have to deal with it.
I'd love to but they permabanned me after 14 years for pointing out that Donald Trump is a pedophile
They also permabanned me for calling a spade a spade when they do salutes on national stages, absolute dogshit website.
I think the first time someone had the idea of doing this to verify if you are not a bot is on YouTube 4-5 years ago (I'm not sure)
At least YouTube allows you to verify without giving any sort of data
If you upload on youtube then you need a google account. Which requires a phone number on a real smartphone.
I certainly don't have my phone number associated with my Google account. Maybe grandfathered in, though?
Oh
Since when?
Not sure but you can try to make an account if you want but it asks you for a phone number and it pops up a button to send some system request to the phone so it's not even a regular sms message it like sends it through some kind of system api
My body is ready.
Reddit should be rightly called Botdit
I'm glad to have completely weaned myself off of that bot-slop website
Snowflakebotdid to be precise.
All the bots will just come to Fedi. I've already seen some.
My guy. Most threads and articles here are posted by bots.
Depends on the instance.
"-We don’t need or want your identity"
LUL
These waves usually turn out better quality users than the lulls when we're otherwise mostly getting the people who've been permabanned from Reddit. So, hopefully we get some good ones!
Hey. I'm high quality and I came from a permaban!
Personally offended !
Jk.
You're banned!
This is going to move the bots to places that don't check.
Getting rid of bots on reddit wojld be as easy as image recognition the same chicks every fucking day aross a million subreddits.
Bots suck but so does age verification
The part where they don’t need or want Identity information is because they already know who you are from sign up.
Hiding unpopular announcements in r/help isn’t enough, he has to post on his own account?
Isnt everyone using it paying an API cost monthly? It should basically already be verified, otherwise why the fuck should anyone pay shit?
already happening. In a similar but different post there are already folks saying "that's why i'm here."
Already noticing them.
I honestly only read comments simping spez.
verification is just a fancy marketing word for 'Digital Tagging'. We are witnessing the death of the anonymous internet in real-time. First, they track your clicks, then they demand your ID under the 'anti-bot' excuse By 2026, the digital grid will be so tight that 'Human' and 'User ID' will be inseparable. Glad I jumped ship to the Fediverse before the cage doors locked. This is exactly why I've been documenting this transition from the 90s privacy to the 2026 surveillance grid the 'Exodus' has truly begun
I heard about this from my monthly stroll to lemmy. Not sure how I feel about this. Did this just get downvoted to the bottom of my feed or did I miss it?
There's a lot of blatant LLM bots on Reddit these days so I think it's a good thing they're doing this. It's also only a matter of time before those same bots start landing on Lemmy, even more so than they already have.
The whole text sounds racist AF
Can you explain? I read it and didn't see anything racist.
I find it interesting that, as you point out, his comment makes zero sense but still gets upvotes, and then as he clarifies he's saying it's racist against chatbots, then people are unambiguously "oh hell no"
Some people upvote at a baseless accusation of racism without actually actually seeing racism or getting clarification that they may have missed... That's a bit sad...
I'm definitely also guilty of sometimes just voting in reaction to a comment without actually reading what they're commenting on.
Like fuck AI, but the general vibe is that bots are anthropomorphic and we should exclude them by the same reasons we previously were excluding black folks.
LLMs are not people, they do not possess will, they do not possess sapience. Not wanting to deal with LLM output is in no way like excluding a group of people based on arbitrary characteristics.
They do not, but you can still be a racist towards them. It's not about llms, it's about you
The general vibe is that LLMs are glorified magic 8 balls that tell you what you want to hear. Honestly I'd rather listen to a magic 8 ball over an AI because it'll actually disagree with you.
You cant be racist towards an object or a piece of tech BECAUSE THEY ARENT SENTIENT NOR ARE THEY A RACE.
I think the point they're trying to make is that racism is a state of mind, and opening oneself up to being racist against a non-human or imaginary thing can open the floodgates to more "real" forms of racism against fellow humans.
Basically the difference between anthropomorphizing bots while one expresses their dislike for interacting with them vs. expressing one's dislike of being forced to interact with a machine that is made to feel like interacting with a person but isn't.
I'm not sure how I feel about this sentiment I've described, but it's one I'm open to arguments on since as a white dude I come into it with a mountain of privilege that likely blinds my view of things
I fully understand the slippery slope argument being made here, but it entirely relies on someone not being able to diffentiate between a non sentient machine and a human. Which yes might be an issue if someone isn't smart/ cognizant enough to tell the difference. But at the end of the day yes as a human I am inherently better and worth more than ANY clanker. And I will continue to hold that belief until it can be proven without a reasonable doubt that one of those metal monsters are sentient. And anyone unable to grasp that point IMO is too afraid of Rokos Basilisk to be considered sane. And I will stand by that statement any day of the goddamn week.
They are not, but you still can be racist towards them
Explain how you can be racist towards something inherently raceless and non-sentient? That's like saying you can be racist towards a fucking furby.
Racism is never about empirical properties of its object. The object is always constructed and reflects the racist's fantasies
Literally why I'm here. Some bullshit in their bot detection flagged me as a bot, and disabled my account, that I had for 7 years.
Noooooooooooo
Quickly! Everyone start massposting shit about Hegel, Kierkegaard, and sharing 3-hour breadtube essays about leftism to drive off the impending brainrot lol
Personally, I'd be happy to see more users, particularly in the niche groups which are often dead as a dead thing. I don't want the bots tho, and I'm thinking that gen AI has probably made the fuckers pretty plausible and hard to identify.
Yeah, the hornyposts have been great for my ability to think about anything other than politics for 5 fucking minutes. I'd like more variety here.
Do the masses not like discussing Kierkegaard?
Of course Spez won't make it sound like there's a problem. The problem is that they're slowly implementing ID verification. Soon, you'll have to provide your ID to prove you're a human. Spez's just trying to sprinkle in some "We don't want your data, we care about user privacy" BS to make the users feel safe for now. Google's doing the same thing by making it difficult to install apps from outside the Play Store.
This guy has a history of doing that.
Not a trustworthy fellow, that guy.
You all complain but in 5 years you'll all defend it like its a gold standard
Reddit is not going to last another 5 years.
imagine that my comment on a post about an age verification process that's being adopted by multiple sites could exist long after reddit fails. What then?