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.
I made the switch to Lemmy today, feels old school kind of good.
Reddit is not only allowing for bots to run rampant, but also it’s managed by the Epstein class and their supporters.
I’m a new lemmy user because of this
BREAKING NEWS! Reddit figured out how to make their platform even shittier
Can we not quote a Polymarket tweet? WTF.
welcome, reddit refugees.
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! 🤣
Well that depends. Were you suggesting that he do that officially or unofficially?
Welcome aboard!
I stand with your 14 year old. Same thing happened to me (well, very similar, my message was more in that clot has just one job category).
I had a similar account that got banned for connecting to the wrong VPN endpoint. Clicked a random server from my VPN provider, suddenly my account was permanently banned with no ability to appeal
Thinking it was just some issue on my end (it was a non-standard looking ban), I logged into another OG account of mine, which also promptly got perma-banned
Extreme incompetence for them to be issuing perma-bans like that based on IP address
Good, next step is installing Artix :3
Funny way to spell Arch
/s
I don’t use Arch, btw
I just moved to CachyOS when I learned about Artix. The distro hopping never truly ends, does it? LOL.
It ends with LFS >: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
Steve, ain’t we glad to have ya! Welcome :)
– again. lol
Thanks for the welcome
Watch /r/politics posts go from 22k upvotes to 3k upvotes overnight.
You have to pick a server.
I promise you, that’s why
You’re probably right and this is the first time I’ve felt kind of glad for the “speed bump” that picking a server on the fediverse has become. We’ll get another influx before too long; maybe a “you need to be this clever to ride the ride” checkpoint isn’t such a bad thing.
That’s what I thought when I initially signed up but I’m realizing we lack diversity baaaaaaad. I’d wager 90%+ of users are tech people and we are infamously antisocial, which is rough for a “social media”
Selecting a server wasn’t an issue for me. The RIF app told me to go to .world and I quickly decided it was the right instance for me to start.
I moreso had to adjust to the slower pace and less engagement on Lemmy compared to reddit, the lack of niche communities, my favorite subs not having a perfect equivalent here.
I was super pissed off with reddit and am still salty, so my anger committed me to making the commitment to Lemmy. I was addicted to reddit and they took away the app I was using for over 10 years. I wasn’t ready for the breakup and was scorned. I was highly motivated to make Lemmy work for me.
Users need that level of anger and outrage to motivate them.
Oh no, how am I going to pick a server?! That’s even harder than choosing a shirt to put on!
It’s weird, but that shit intimidates non technical people, and there are a lot of them. It would need better if it says something like ‘Click on the flag of the country closest to where you live’ or something like that.
Linux seems to have managed to do this - I recently did I mint install on my laptop, it was all GUI, no arcane jargon, no need to use the console, really well optimised for the non-technical folk. You’d be surprised how many people see ‘server’ and think ‘I don’t have one of those, and I don’t think I want one’.
join-lemmy.org now shows you a suggested instance where you can signup immediately. No need to choose an instance.
Is there a reason to expect bots won’t overwhelm Lemmy as well?
Most likely, they will. They are not elikely to infect larger instances. Smaller instances will spot them and ban them, I hope.
Why do you expect they will be unlikely to infect larger instances?
They will still infect them but they will be more obvious.
An unusual comment, you don’t know it’s a bot.
Hundreds of unusual comments and doesn’t engage with the local community. It’s a bot.
It’s partly why online discourse is toxic. There is a disconnect with th real world and online and no social stigma. On a small community instances there is.
The problem though, will be trying to manage which isntances need to be blocked as they are rampant with bota. If the fediverse grows and there are lots of smaller communities,.it will be harder to keep track. Currently it’s small and most instances with active users are familiar.
This is the real question here. Especially with advanced AI, it might be difficult to spot bot accounts.
I actually believe AI will provide a far greater advantage to bots than moderators.
I (mildly) am concerned about that also…but bear in mind…the difference between Lemmy and Reddit is you can…defederate…from known bad instances. If Lemmy goes in that direction - and we undertake the idea I mentioned here - https://lemmy.world/post/44633911/22828600
then we can basically recreate a blacklist / whitelist (ala AdBlock). Instance-wide crawlers can still scrape public data, but that’s an ActivityPub protocol constraint, not a Lemmy failure.
Instance crawling with bots? Sorry, no soup for you.
Spam bots on bad instances? Blocked from your feed.
Peak “fine, I’ll do it myself” energy? Yes. But if you’re reading this, you’re 1) part of the resistance (lol) and (2) already here, so …
Not nearly as much financial incentive for the admins to look the other way
It still is more populated and has a lot higher activity, which suits slightly better for doomscrolling.
Lemmy needs to get slightly more popular. And maybe a centralized place to find different instances?
Like i haven’t found any active fitness related ones.It’s like coming from a convention Hall full of people and going into a minimally occupied hotel.
Centralisation of power is in the first place why we moved away from Reddit. Fuck that.
You can find your own fitness sidelemmy. There are actually a few I found.
Completely fair, just the difference and lack of constant flow of content is going to put off many people and without a significant enough drive there’s no point to get used to the new environment.
Mind pointing me in a the right direction?
/r/rats and tv show discussions for me
This is basically all I use for now. Lemmy doesn’t have the infrastructure for every TV episode and movie I watch.
yeah. and even in the generic tv show communities there are maybe a couple people discussing a new episode, if at all.
Compared to thousands for a popular show.
heck, even star trek is barely active compared to reddit. and they did an official migration in the beginning
Because Lemmings can be insufferable sometimes.
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.
Yeah, we are pretty great 😎
Not gonna lie, I like it this way.
Right… 15 years ago…
I think the downvotes are proving you right 😉
As opposed to Reddit users?
Yes. There’s much more grand standing.
Well yea but it’s because we’re right 👍
Have you considered changing instances?
I just block people. That’s much more effective.
Well you are on one of the worst instances.
Im sure the website that sold userdata to every single AI company to train their models on wouldn’t ever even think of selling the faces of every one of its users to a company to train its AI face generator on.
Or that the website which accidentally admitted “the most reddit addicted city” is an air force base that hosts their online counterintelligence teams… Where was I going with this? Hmm must be nothing.
selling the faces of every one of its users to a company to train its AI face generator on
Okay, but wouldn’t it be kind of funny if every AI face generator suddenly started producing faces that look like Redditors?
I love the conspiracy theory that it’s Elgin Air Force Base, aka Area 51 version 2 .
This data surely goes straight to Palentir
They made it easier for bots to thrive by allowing hidden post histories, limiting the API, and punishing users for “bad” reports, but claim they need face ID to filter out bots?
Requiring face ID AFTER genAI has become great at generating faces is certainly a decision
No one ever accused reddit of making good decisions.
I’d be bold enough to say this decision is absolutely on par with their other brain dead decisions.
They’re maximizing ad revenue, that is the rationale.
Next step will be to require Video with bop-it style live instructions, stick out your tongue, blink one eye, pick your nose, make finger guns, smile, frown. They won’t care that it’s not disability friendly.
Facebook tried to make me take a video of myself moving my head around making different facial expressions to prove I was a person. I was like… not even my bank requires that. This was after making a comment that was Trump-negging. So I cancelled it.
Discord has a similar system in place, people were defeating it with the Photo mode in Death Standing lmao
The real problem was third party clients I swear
So glad I ditched reddit.
I mean, requiring FaceID is a horrible idea, but there maybe might be a better alternative (I’m talking about the general idea of a “proof of humanity” online, not specifically using this solution).
The fact of the matter is that bots are a massive issue online. When russia got sanctioned and cut off from the western Internet, r/Conservative went radio silent for a couple of days - until they figured out how to VPN through the Netherlands. There are whole communities where bots discuss bot-posted content. And I have no doubt in my mind that it will also happen on Lemmy as soon as there’s even a hint of profit* to be found.
* “profit” not as in “monetary gain”, but as “any kind of gain, be it money, influence, propaganda, chaos”, etc., etc.
never been happier to have been banned for no reason at all
