warmaster@lemmy.world
on 25 Mar 19:28
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
They should start with all the commenters in the thread praising the Spez.
SwifferWetjet@thelemmy.club
on 25 Mar 19:44
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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🤔
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.
voidsignal@lemmy.world
on 25 Mar 20:43
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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.
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.
OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 03:34
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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.
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.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 25 Mar 20:45
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That’s the neat part. The Fediverse doesn’t eat itself; more activity on Piefed is more activity on Lemmy.
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip
on 26 Mar 02:16
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Piefed is here talking to you right now. It’s all the same shit
TommySoda@lemmy.world
on 25 Mar 20:11
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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.
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…”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Mar 01:52
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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.
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Mar 04:43
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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.
Yeah well I don’t really care for your opinion and I wasn’t talking to you. I appreciate the feedback, though. The person above seems like they actually have social skills outside of calling people “chuds” and “neckbeards” as their only respone so I’d much rather talk to them tbh
mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de
on 27 Mar 19:06
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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.
It’s definitely hard to tell someone’s tone when it comes to text so i appreciate you mentioning that. I understand the confusion as I wasnt very clear in what I was talking about which is 100% my fault. I went a little off the handle and got defensive, I will admit, and I apologize for that.
I guess the point that I was trying to make is more so that we have many different ways to do it for years I was talking about things like captchas. The problem, in my opinion, is that captchas didn’t evolve with the Internet. We’ve been picking traffic lights for over a decade now and it’s obviously not working anymore. My whole idea with drawing pictures was to make it more human centric than clicking a bunch if buttons. Something that can take in the raw input of a mouse cursor or touchscreen and determine whether or not the movements are “human”. Like a fingerprint that doesn’t identify you. If it sees too many predictable patterns it flags it. I just feel like there’s a lot of wasted potential in older human verification systems that have stagnated. We’ve just accepted bots as the norm online and the company’s in charge aren’t doing a damn thing besides saying they’ll do something with no action.
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.
teyrnon@sh.itjust.works
on 25 Mar 21:23
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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.
CodenameDarlen@lemmy.world
on 25 Mar 20:51
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I’m still trying to understsnd the logic behind assuming he’s mean to say exactly the opposite of what he said
He falsely accused the developer of Apollo, the late most popular reddit app, of blackmailing him.
Not a trustworthy fellow, that guy.
CodenameDarlen@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 06:53
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I think he’s talking about verification ID as in the platform, not as some service that comply with laws. Because verification ID is already being requested in Brazil, I live here and people from the regional privacy subreddit shared a few screenshot of Reddit asking for ID.
Not sure what he mean with promising Reddit won’t ask for verification ID while it’s actually already asking for it.
Idk what to think about this, I just know if I need show my ID and there’s no way to bypass that Reddit is definitely dead to me.
RustyShackleford@piefed.social
on 25 Mar 20:37
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Can someone explain? Isn’t removing bots actually a good thing?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world
on 25 Mar 20:49
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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.
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.
TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com
on 25 Mar 21:00
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The part where they don’t need or want Identity information is because they already know who you are from sign up.
geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
on 25 Mar 21:00
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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.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
on 25 Mar 21:05
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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
orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts
on 25 Mar 21:13
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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”
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.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works
on 26 Mar 02:06
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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.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works
on 26 Mar 16:31
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But thats the easy part! It’s expensive to produce and cheap to verify.
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?
NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
on 25 Mar 22:10
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already happening. In a similar but different post there are already folks saying “that’s why i’m here.”
HubertManne@piefed.social
on 25 Mar 22:17
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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.
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.
Every other website:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/4cb0668c-465c-487a-bae0-bf947f3b6267.jpeg">
HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml
on 26 Mar 00:22
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Or Cloudflare.
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip
on 26 Mar 02:13
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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.
ChristchurchAsshole@lemmy.ml
on 26 Mar 01:20
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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.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works
on 26 Mar 01:49
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Doesn’t that make it a bad test? It should be easy for humans and hard for machines.
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.”
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.
Can’t forget /r/worldnews which is literally just an israeli bot farm
DrDickHandler@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 12:47
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They are not actually going to touch these bots. You are just clueless if you think they will remove their own propaganda tools.
InvalidName2@lemmy.zip
on 26 Mar 03:31
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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!
insaneinthemembrane@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 10:02
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You’re banned!
FauxLiving@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 03:53
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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).
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 26 Mar 04:03
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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.
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 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!)
FauxLiving@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 04:34
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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
Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 06:58
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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.
I figured that would happen again with reddit, but to my disappointment the internet is a much different place than it used to be.
Paranoidfactoid@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 15:16
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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.
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.
ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 26 Mar 04:09
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All the bots will just come to Fedi. I’ve already seen some.
DrDickHandler@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 12:49
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My guy. Most threads and articles here are posted by bots.
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.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 06:56
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I profoundly apologize to the stupid community who are not using reddit.
apology accepted
auntieclokwise@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 07:54
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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.
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.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 06:55
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my little hometown somehow had a subreddit. i don’t know how
auntieclokwise@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 07:50
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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.
insaneinthemembrane@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 09:59
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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.
FosterMolasses@leminal.space
on 26 Mar 13:35
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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.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
on 26 Mar 13:33
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Exactly. For me it was Cats (all animals, really) and Guitars.
Political discussions are far better on Lemmy.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 13:52
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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.
ugandan_airways@lemmy.zip
on 26 Mar 14:31
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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.
bitwolf@sh.itjust.works
on 26 Mar 16:59
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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
FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works
on 26 Mar 22:12
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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.
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.
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.
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”.
BJ_and_the_bear@lemmy.world
on 27 Mar 02:35
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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
Like, you verify the account and then give it away to a bot? My assumption is that the “proof of human” would be a unique identifier, meaning that once you’ve attached it to an account, you can’t use it to verify another.
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.
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).
If it’s a third party tool that does the verification, that’s false.
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 12:31
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I actually read the announcement, and there’s nothing controversial there. They delete 100k bot accounts daily.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
on 26 Mar 13:31
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Then why make the announcement?
You described their normal behavior, now they’ve made this announcement. Something must have changed.
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 13:49
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**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.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
on 26 Mar 13:55
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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.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
on 26 Mar 13:30
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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.
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.
FosterMolasses@leminal.space
on 26 Mar 13:40
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Noooooooooooo
Quickly! Everyone start massposting shit about Hegel, Kierkegaard, and sharing 3-hour breadtube essays about leftism to drive off the impending brainrot lol
Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 13:44
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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.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 14:27
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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.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 14:26
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Do the masses not like discussing Kierkegaard?
vivalapivo@lemmy.today
on 26 Mar 13:54
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Can you explain? I read it and didn’t see anything racist.
vivalapivo@lemmy.today
on 26 Mar 15:59
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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.
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.
vivalapivo@lemmy.today
on 26 Mar 17:12
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BECAUSE THEY ARENT SENTIENT NOR ARE THEY A RACE.
They are not, but you still can be racist towards them
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.
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…
Zitronenlolli@thelemmy.club
on 26 Mar 14:16
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For some reason, most of the responses welcome that decision!?
I guess the others were banned.
JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org
on 26 Mar 15:46
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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.
AnotherUsername@lemmy.ml
on 26 Mar 17:53
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Yup. Conspiracy theories aside, the bot problem is an actual hard problem to solve.
berrodeguarana@lemmy.eco.br
on 26 Mar 19:28
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Team Fortress 2 players reliving their PTSD trauma with your comment
FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works
on 26 Mar 22:02
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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.
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.
floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 26 Mar 16:20
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Spez announces they won’t tolerate competing astroturfing, only shareholder-approved bots will remain.
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 !
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).
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.
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
Hiding unpopular announcements in r/help isn’t enough, he has to post on his own account?
berrodeguarana@lemmy.eco.br
on 26 Mar 19:27
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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.
pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 28 Mar 07:15
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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
That sounds like a 2 step auth for logins they’ve been doing for a while. I might have made a new burner email last year and it asked for absolutely no real information.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
on 26 Mar 21:55
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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.
712@discuss.tchncs.de
on 26 Mar 23:32
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Ooo, this is the first I’ve heard of this but it looks really cool and promising! Get all the info and art without all the bots / bad users. I do miss the NIN commenters, but I’m also in their discord and there’s plenty of community to be found there!
YetiBeets@lemmy.world
on 27 Mar 02:00
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Get ready for the tankies and other assholes to scare off all the new users again :D
Every time this happens we gain new comrades while filtering out the worst of the insufferable reddit stereotypes to the reddit instances, thus keeping the rest of the fediverse clean. We are like mussel colonies filtering out fedora behavior. You’re welcome.
Usually when people leave reddit, many communists do come and find a much better place here. I think it’s good that we have a lot of left wing people here, and have little tolerance for right-wing and pro-imperialist views.
That’s how practically the entirety of the Internet was before it was monopolized and shoved into apps on smartphones. It was all leftists and hobbyists.
Maybe my standards have been lowered by nextdoor. Nobody spelling you “ewe” because they’re using voice to text and not proof reading their brain diarrhea.
What are the problems with wanting production and distribution to be collectivized and oriented around needs, rather than profits? How is this comparable to Reddit?
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
on 27 Mar 18:22
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Though I’m new here, lots of communities rules are copypasta from breddit, so what’s honestly different on here?
WraithGear@lemmy.world
on 27 Mar 03:56
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the damage is spread much thinner across the spaces. instead of one major peice of shit, you have many fiefdomes, and only most are smaller peices of shit.
but hey! there is always the next horizon. move to a better instance when needed
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?
Nathan_TheAuthor@lemmus.org
on 27 Mar 17:19
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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
We are witnessing the death of the anonymous internet in real-time.
Fedi is still here :3
Nathan_TheAuthor@lemmus.org
on 27 Mar 19:36
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yo karl u hit the nail on the head fr… spez is just the beginnin. we r literally watchin the 2026 digital cage being built right now. i actually spent a lot of time writin about this exact ‘death of anonymity’ in my book final exodus. its crazy how what we thought was fiction is becomin our daily reality. fedi is the last lifeboat left tbh
Nathan_TheAuthor@lemmus.org
on 27 Mar 19:38
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if u want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes regarding the end of anonymous life check out chapter 17 in my book… i’d love to get ur thoughts on it since u clearly see whats comin
play.google.com/store/books/details?id=-0_GEQAAQB…
yardratianSoma@lemmy.ca
on 27 Mar 21:29
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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.
threaded - newest
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”
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/768d37a4-19e1-451a-b506-75200f6d4955.png">
When I read “log factory” I was thinking of Splunk or something similar. I’m tired.
Yes. Spelunking in the log factory.
They should start with all the commenters in the thread praising the Spez.
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:
reddit.com/…/here_is_the_evidence_that_reddit_use…
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.
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.
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 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.
That’s the neat part. The Fediverse doesn’t eat itself; more activity on Piefed is more activity on Lemmy.
Piefed is here talking to you right now. It’s all the same shit
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
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.
Deny, defy, 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 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.
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.
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.
Yeah well I don’t really care for your opinion and I wasn’t talking to you. I appreciate the feedback, though. The person above seems like they actually have social skills outside of calling people “chuds” and “neckbeards” as their only respone so I’d much rather talk to them tbh
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.
It’s definitely hard to tell someone’s tone when it comes to text so i appreciate you mentioning that. I understand the confusion as I wasnt very clear in what I was talking about which is 100% my fault. I went a little off the handle and got defensive, I will admit, and I apologize for that.
I guess the point that I was trying to make is more so that we have many different ways to do it for years I was talking about things like captchas. The problem, in my opinion, is that captchas didn’t evolve with the Internet. We’ve been picking traffic lights for over a decade now and it’s obviously not working anymore. My whole idea with drawing pictures was to make it more human centric than clicking a bunch if buttons. Something that can take in the raw input of a mouse cursor or touchscreen and determine whether or not the movements are “human”. Like a fingerprint that doesn’t identify you. If it sees too many predictable patterns it flags it. I just feel like there’s a lot of wasted potential in older human verification systems that have stagnated. We’ve just accepted bots as the norm online and the company’s in charge aren’t doing a damn thing besides saying they’ll do something with no action.
.
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
What’s the problem here? I read his post and couldn’t understsnd what lead people here to overreact like that
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.
I’m still trying to understsnd the logic behind assuming he’s mean to say exactly the opposite of what he said
This guy has a history of doing that.
Mind sharing any source?
Not a trustworthy fellow, that guy.
I think he’s talking about verification ID as in the platform, not as some service that comply with laws. Because verification ID is already being requested in Brazil, I live here and people from the regional privacy subreddit shared a few screenshot of Reddit asking for ID.
Not sure what he mean with promising Reddit won’t ask for verification ID while it’s actually already asking for it.
Idk what to think about this, I just know if I need show my ID and there’s no way to bypass that Reddit is definitely dead to me.
<img alt="" src="https://media.piefed.social/posts/m0/vX/m0vXAHHUg6RgQck.png">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/bdf8f65f-3281-4084-8310-84d044fd330c.png">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b5bc857c-6fae-49a7-bb41-63348f05f549.jpeg">
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
Isnt everyone using it paying an API cost monthly? It should basically already be verified, otherwise why the fuck should anyone pay shit?
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 part where they don’t need or want Identity information is because they already know who you are from sign up.
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.
Yay! Welcome new Fedi-frens!!
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
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:
techcrunch.com/…/meta-plans-to-add-facial-recogni…
businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-fa…
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.
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?
Already noticing them.
So what’s will happen to their existing bot accounts? Erase 75% of their current users?
if ip.geolocation == "Langley, VA": verifyUser()Replace with their own bots and paying customers’ bots.
Lmao hopefully
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.
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!
Keep it up, you’re awesome!
This is one of the things I love. Talk about something you like, creator shows up. Wholesome.
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
Out of curiosity, why foes F-Droid warn about anti-features?
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.
Ty ,great app , greatings from Belgium
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.
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.
Every other website: <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/4cb0668c-465c-487a-bae0-bf947f3b6267.jpeg">
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.
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.
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.”
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
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
.
Without bots their most popular text based subs like AITAH or TwoHotTakes would be empty.
“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?”
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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!)
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 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.
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.
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.
My body is ready.
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.
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.
Psst ,we humans left reddit in 2023
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.
Exactly. For me it was Cats (all animals, really) and Guitars.
Political discussions are far better on Lemmy.
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.
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
Yeah I think big hubs are too problematic.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Not sure I understand what you mean.
Like, you verify the account and then give it away to a bot? My assumption is that the “proof of human” would be a unique identifier, meaning that once you’ve attached it to an account, you can’t use it to verify another.
This is not ID checks.
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.
lemmy.ml/post/45007584/24779562
If it’s a third party tool that does the verification, that’s false.
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.
**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.”
investors getting nervous?
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.
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.
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?
The whole text sounds racist AF
Can you explain? I read it and didn’t see anything racist.
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.
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
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.
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.
I honestly only read comments simping spez.
For some reason, most of the responses welcome that decision!? I guess the others were banned.
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.
Team Fortress 2 players reliving their PTSD trauma with your comment
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.
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.
Spez announces they won’t tolerate competing astroturfing, only shareholder-approved bots will remain.
This is pretty uncontroversial as far as reddit announcements go. They aren’t requiring identity verification.
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 !
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.
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?
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.
Reddit should be rightly called Botdit
I’m glad to have completely weaned myself off of that bot-slop website
Snowflakebotdid to be precise.
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.
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
That sounds like a 2 step auth for logins they’ve been doing for a while. I might have made a new burner email last year and it asked for absolutely no real information.
I certainly don’t have my phone number associated with my Google account. Maybe grandfathered in, though?
Yeah earlier google accounts were much less restrictive
Oh
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.
Let’s go! We can all make Lemmy better.
I’ve been thinking the same thing, but I don’t even know how to do that
Don’t create an account, use (or host) a Redlib instance, subscribe to your favourite subreddits and then bookmark it afterwards, that’s what I do.
Ooo, this is the first I’ve heard of this but it looks really cool and promising! Get all the info and art without all the bots / bad users. I do miss the NIN commenters, but I’m also in their discord and there’s plenty of community to be found there!
Get ready for the tankies and other assholes to scare off all the new users again :D
Every time this happens we gain new comrades while filtering out the worst of the insufferable reddit stereotypes to the reddit instances, thus keeping the rest of the fediverse clean. We are like mussel colonies filtering out fedora behavior. You’re welcome.
Usually when people leave reddit, many communists do come and find a much better place here. I think it’s good that we have a lot of left wing people here, and have little tolerance for right-wing and pro-imperialist views.
That’s how practically the entirety of the Internet was before it was monopolized and shoved into apps on smartphones. It was all leftists and hobbyists.
Yep, it’s kinda fun that way.
You mean a place where you can have intelligent discourse without somebody smearing shit all over while parroting Fox News talking points?
I wouldn’t say social media is a good space for intelligent conversations, haha.
Maybe my standards have been lowered by nextdoor. Nobody spelling you “ewe” because they’re using voice to text and not proof reading their brain diarrhea.
That’s fair, haha.
Do you prefer hanging out with the reactionaries?
Idk, y’all are not much better than Reddit. Just a different kind of sycophant here.
What are the problems with wanting production and distribution to be collectivized and oriented around needs, rather than profits? How is this comparable to Reddit?
I don’t think that part is the problem
Then what is?
I think he might be talking about the userbase.
(I agree 😬)
I disagree, then.
👍
People who are “scared off” by leftwing politics are probably happier elsewhere anyway
Though I’m new here, lots of communities rules are copypasta from breddit, so what’s honestly different on here?
the damage is spread much thinner across the spaces. instead of one major peice of shit, you have many fiefdomes, and only most are smaller peices of shit.
but hey! there is always the next horizon. move to a better instance when needed
Many more communists and linux enthusiasts.
Less porn. Most of it seems to be from Reddit copy bots. So I guess that’s the real effect we are going to notice.
We don’t need more people, we need more good content!
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.
We dont want those bots here either
“-We don’t need or want your identity”
LUL
If they get rid of the bots, though, there won’t be any more posts.
Yep, sometimes I think they run all those bots.
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
Fedi is still here :3
yo karl u hit the nail on the head fr… spez is just the beginnin. we r literally watchin the 2026 digital cage being built right now. i actually spent a lot of time writin about this exact ‘death of anonymity’ in my book final exodus. its crazy how what we thought was fiction is becomin our daily reality. fedi is the last lifeboat left tbh
if u want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes regarding the end of anonymous life check out chapter 17 in my book… i’d love to get ur thoughts on it since u clearly see whats comin play.google.com/store/books/details?id=-0_GEQAAQB…
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.
New user here. Just approved and arrived. Greetings and salutations, folks 🙏🏻
Welcome! We’re happy to have you here.
Thank you 😊