Reddit CEO says facial verification may be introduced. Ostensibly to prevent bots.
But we all know how dangerous this can be. But most likely Reddit users will just accept it.
Although they have a great free analogue right under their noses - Lemmy. Which is many times better than its competitor.
I wish more people would discover Lemmy, but that’s unlikely.
There’s no way they want to eliminate bot traffic, it would kill 2/3rds of their traffic instantly. So this just means, “bots that aren’t paying us.”
Reddit, very famously, used bot traffic at its inception to create the illusion of a community big enough to compete with Digg.
It was the OG “fake it till you make it” business.
As the company implements an increasingly draconian “ban every account that looks at me sideways” admin policy, I’m not sure if “2/3rds of the traiffc” isn’t lowballing it. There are entire threads - from initial post to bullshit bottom comment - that get created by bot traffic on the modern site. It’s a full blown hall of mirrors over there.
How can you tell? Not attacking, just curious. I never could tell, well maybe if usernames are all oddly similarly patterned, and even than, I can’t be sure it’s not some app/program that hands out those ids when you register in it, as people sometimes can be too lazy to come up with a meaningful username. Short comments can also be made by dumb humans, long posts can be written by modern Artificial Idiot. 20 years ago, I could tell spam post, cause they all were literally either identical to each other, or at least totally ignored context and never responded to questions. Now I am not sure at all. Definitely some people are less eloquent than AI.