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.
Keep going /u/spez you fucking sell-out donkey.
Hiding unpopular announcements in r/help isn’t enough, he has to post on his own account?
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.
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 !
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.
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.
Yup. Conspiracy theories aside, the bot problem is an actual hard problem to solve.
Team Fortress 2 players reliving their PTSD trauma with your comment
This is pretty uncontroversial as far as reddit announcements go. They aren’t requiring identity verification.
Spez announces they won’t tolerate competing astroturfing, only shareholder-approved bots will remain.
For some reason, most of the responses welcome that decision!? I guess the others were banned.
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
I honestly only read comments simping spez.
I actually read the announcement, and there’s nothing controversial there. They delete 100k bot accounts daily.
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.
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.”
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…
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.
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.
BECAUSE THEY ARENT SENTIENT NOR ARE THEY A RACE.
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
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 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.
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.
Honestly I’m from the time where there used to be forums for these things and I liked forums just fine.
Same. I think it we moved back to forums the internet experience would improve
Yeah I think big hubs are too problematic.
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.
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.
Exactly. For me it was Cats (all animals, really) and Guitars.
Political discussions are far better on Lemmy.
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.
Yeah I also liked the show subs where people theorized and discussed details.
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
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.
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.
https://lemmy.ml/post/45007584/24779562
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).
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.
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:
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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.
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Biometric services. Strictly speaking, not an ID but it’s not hard to imagine leveraging capturing biometrics to an ID like scenario.
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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.
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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.
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:

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.
“We can’t let the terrorists win!!”
You’d really hand over your government ID to Spez? Lmao
Did you read the announcement? This has nothing to do with identification.
Did you not read anything from the linked post, or did you fail to understand it?
Who says anything about government ID?










