Reddit CEO says facial verification may be introduced. Ostensibly to prevent bots.
But we all know how dangerous this can be. But most likely Reddit users will just accept it.
Although they have a great free analogue right under their noses - Lemmy. Which is many times better than its competitor.
I wish more people would discover Lemmy, but that’s unlikely.
More lowkey polymarket advertisements.
Why is it the only place I see polymarket is on Lemmy screenshots?
This is what made me finally bite the bullet and switch to lemmy.
Because Lemmings can be insufferable sometimes.
Well you are on one of the worst instances.
Have you considered changing instances?
So were Redditors 15-20 years ago, though. This place is exactly like the old Reddit ecosystem. Heavily focused on programming, Linux, and Star Trek. The smaller subs for politics, culture, news, etc take longer to build up.
Right… 15 years ago…
I think the downvotes are proving you right 😉
Unless it’s THEIR AI bots, right?
I see the rationale, dead internet theory and all. The problem is that if this happened, I 100% believe Reddit would form a partnership with the US government or oil companies to put bots on their platform and spread misinformation.
Or? I think you mean and. Then throw several more ands in there, including AI platforms, surveillance tech, right wing PACs, and overall enshitification and misinformation.
It took a lot of customer abuse to break Reddit’s stranglehold, but they are perilously close to a Digg like migration off their platform. Spez can take a hike into bankruptcy.
Just already made his billions, what does he care
Fuck reddit. I’ve been hanging on for too long until they banned me 3 times in 72 hours. I guess they don’t like criticism of the current regime. Fuck reddit.
get ready for an influx of users to Lemmy I guess.
That’s part of why I made my account here. Might as well start getting familiar with the alternative. That and the mods on Reddit are out of control handing out bans for jokes about violence. Like the other day, I joked we should shoot robot dogs and got handed a site wide 3 day ban.
What are we supposed to get them for a welcoming gift? Was it beans or something?
I actually made my account here recently because of that post. I’d be surprised if I’m the only one. We may not get everyone on reddit, but a sizable chunk leaving and review bombing them in the app store could gain their attention.
Maybe they realized that most of Reddit is like Moltbook
welcome, reddit refugees.
Thanks for the welcome
Thank you. This is why I’m here.
Ditto!
Well that and they permabanned my 14 year old, 1million karma account for making a post that insinuated Donald is a pedophile that some MAGA got all upset about and they rejected my appeal.
So…fuck em.
Mine was for suggesting Biden drone strike SCOTUS justices immediately after they ruled that the president is effectively above the law. I wasn’t advocating for Biden to do anything illegal! 🤣
Good, next step is installing Artix :3
Do they have a T2 distribution for Macs?
I was making a rather annoying joke. LFS might work on with Asahi’s bootloading, but then you are dealing with Linux From Scratch which could only ever make sense to any degree with Nix
Funny way to spell Arch
/s
I don’t use Arch, btw
– again. lol
Requiring face ID AFTER genAI has become great at generating faces is certainly a decision
No one ever accused reddit of making good decisions.
They’re maximizing ad revenue, that is the rationale.
You know if you have a printed piece of paper, a magazine. Or even a TV with a face on it, that a camera can’t tell if it’s a real human or not.
There’s no way they want to eliminate bot traffic, it would kill 2/3rds of their traffic instantly. So this just means, “bots that aren’t paying us.”
Reddit, very famously, used bot traffic at its inception to create the illusion of a community big enough to compete with Digg.
It was the OG “fake it till you make it” business.
As the company implements an increasingly draconian “ban every account that looks at me sideways” admin policy, I’m not sure if “2/3rds of the traiffc” isn’t lowballing it. There are entire threads - from initial post to bullshit bottom comment - that get created by bot traffic on the modern site. It’s a full blown hall of mirrors over there.
OG “fake it till you make it” business.
Feels like 99% of “social” network startups. The dead Internet theory started before the LLM craze.
Goes back to email. Easier to create a machine that churns out digital messages than find humans to do the work manually. So you get increasing loads of spam and gibberish, attempting to out-shout one another in a digital space with no bureaucratic regulation or material limits.
That said, one thing that made early social media like Facebook and MySpace and Livejournal appear valuable was the degree of human interaction. What’s more, the interpersonal networks that formed between verified humans gave enormous value to communications across the platform.
Facebook did a pretty good job, early on, of limiting who could join based on authentication through college admin offices. MySpace had a large cohort of real human artists producing real human music, which attracted a real human following. Livejournal predated a lot of advertisement-by-blogging. After the Dot-Com bubble burst, this is where you could see green shoots of economic value in a digital space.
We’ve demolished all that chasing fictitious capital. How valuable it was in practice is debatable, of course. But it’s all gone now.
Tumblr survived botification largely culturally intact
I’ll have to take your word for it
Take mine too. It’s really funny how tumblr banned porn so all the gooners went to twitter and now tumblr is kinda healthy with a really vocal userbase that WILL backlash at any attempt on enshittifying the platform
The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO, but he’s too busy making everyone distrust Wordpress.
The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO
The ban of every website’s existence.
Pretty sure it dates back to the dawn of commerce.
The dead internet isn’t a theory on Reddit. It’s a reality there. Almost all traffic is
I read somewhere that it’s estimated that reddit is 90% bots in the comments, and we already know 99% of front page context is from bots accounts.
I think it more means “we want to sell your face data”
JUST IN: Reddit CEO says company is considering requiring all bots on the platform to click on ads in order to drive revenue to Reddit.
If not already, I assume they’ll offer a for-fee API for bots.
I dont doubt it, but is there a proper source to share?
