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?
On Reddit? Apparently posts about it get nuked by mods. So of course people reposted even more.
they’ll go to piefed; there’s nothing to get ready for.
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.
Piefed is here talking to you right now. It’s all the same shit
Lemmy, piefed, kbin, all valid and handy, tbh.
That’s the neat part. The Fediverse doesn’t eat itself; more activity on Piefed is more activity on Lemmy.
One more reason to be glad I left that shithole. Also, expect Redlib to finally be killed off soon.
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.
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.
Lol, no. That would hurt their stock price
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.
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
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…”
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
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.
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.
I don’t think we have enough gumption to actually do it, but here’s to hoping.
People forget that glass bottles and gasoline are (relatively) inexpensive
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.
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.
-
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.
already happening. In a similar but different post there are already folks saying “that’s why i’m here.”
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.
Spez (Reddit CEO) just put out an announcemen talking about how they’ll verify humans via a new rectal probe in collaboration with Meta AI that 3D scans your log factory.
When I read “log factory” I was thinking of Splunk or something similar. I’m tired.
Yes. Spelunking in the log factory.
fitting translation for “meta”
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.
or making it so you have to be a paid Reddit subscriber to have expanded API access.
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?
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:
When confirming that there is a human behind an account, we prefer third-party tools that keep a distance between verification and Reddit itself. Any system we use will not expose your real-world identity to Reddit nor your Reddit username or activity to any third party. There are a handful of ways to do this, and I’m sure there will be more. Each have their tradeoffs:
- Passkeys (which are well supported by Apple, Google, YubiKey, and various password managers) - These are lightweight, require a human to do something, and don’t require your ID. The tradeoff is that there is no proof of individuality or anything other than “a human probably did something.” Nevertheless, it’s a great starting point.
- Third-party biometric services - For example, World ID (yes, the Orb company, though they have non-Orb solutions as well). This technology unlocks proof-of-individual without requiring your name, government ID, or a centralized database. I think the internet needs verification solutions like this, where your account information, usage data, and identity never mix.
- Third-party government ID services - In some countries, such as the UK and Australia, governments require us to use these. These are the least secure, least private, and least preferred. When we are forced to do this, we design the integrations so that we never actually see your ID information, so your Reddit data cannot be tied to you.
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
-
They should start with all the commenters in the thread praising the Spez.
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.
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 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.
I don’t think this should be an hyperbole. Get to work, now.
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:
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.
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://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.
