Reddit and FaceID Verification
(midwest.social)
kamayatu24
PrivacyReddit 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.
Bots will have verification down to the science, done and verified as humans certified... way before actual humans even manage to turn on their cameras.
a big reason people won’t come to lemmy is the content is a political echo chamber and defederation is confusing as a concept to most people. i agree with most political opinions i see on here, but it’s kind of annoying to just see politics every time i open the app. maybe i just need to get better at tuning my feed, but most of the popular subs are political in some way.
politics is at lemmy's core, it was literally created by communists & socialists to serve as an online community for leftists; not rightists like liberals or conservatives.
Plus...there is a LOT to talk about these days, and most sane takes have been effectively banned from all large platforms lmao, with people helping all this along by voluntarily censoring the DUMBEST FUCKING WORDS in their memes, even, just to further their own reach within those shit holes.
So. Yeah, Lemmy be political.
humanity
Not the best choice of word.
Yeah...that's it...bots...you don't want to associate all the post history and behavioral data with a real live person and connect whatever data you can find on the open data market with the same real person, collating everything the internet knows about a person into a single profile, destroying anonymity completely, ushering in a new age of Internet censorship and repression and aiding the identification of target groups for political and commercial exploitation? Nah....you wouldn't want to do that, would you?
I dont doubt it, but is there a proper source to share?
welcome, reddit refugees.
Thank you. This is why I’m here.
Ditto!
Well that and they permabanned my 14 year old, 1million karma account for making a post that insinuated Donald is a pedophile that some MAGA got all upset about and they rejected my appeal.
So....fuck em.
I stand with your 14 year old. Same thing happened to me (well, very similar, my message was more in that clot has just one job category).
Good, next step is installing Artix :3
Funny way to spell Arch
/s
I don't use Arch, btw
-- again. lol
Requiring face ID AFTER genAI has become great at generating faces is certainly a decision
No one ever accused reddit of making good decisions.
I’d be bold enough to say this decision is absolutely on par with their other brain dead decisions.
Next step will be to require Video with bop-it style live instructions, stick out your tongue, blink one eye, pick your nose, make finger guns, smile, frown. They won't care that it's not disability friendly.
Facebook tried to make me take a video of myself moving my head around making different facial expressions to prove I was a person. I was like... not even my bank requires that. This was after making a comment that was Trump-negging. So I cancelled it.
They're maximizing ad revenue, that is the rationale.
I was banned a few years ago now, glad I was.
I wonder how much that would reduce their traffic. Would there be anything but niche groups left?
Dead internet theory becoming more true by the day. I mean, it was already true, now it's just more true.
The only reason why Reddit is anywhere close to where it is right now and not considered the sweaty place it was and right after 4Chan in dissociability is Reddit's data sharing with Google and the reception of better search rankings.
Comply by drinking a verification can
Wtf lol. I won't log in.
I hope they do it, so that they (Reddit) crash and burn.
I also hope they don't do it, so that we don't turn Lemmy into Reddit 2.0 due to max influx.
Realistically? If they do end up doing it, I wouldn't be surprised if no one over there bats an eyelid.
Point of order: Facebook already tried this
https://m.facebook.com/help/159096464162185/
Remember: enshittification can only exists until the moment it induces enough friction. Then people push back. Cf online streaming in 2013 vs 2026.
We're not quite there yet. TBTB are doing a stellar job of increasing the water temp almost imperceptibly.
Well no. Then it's only a matter of time before pranksters use your digital face for nefarious purposes.
Or more likely, fascist governments use it to get rid of the undesireables who dare go against their plan. Thats why authoritarian right wingers love AI.
Since when is Polymarket's Twitter account a reliable source of information?
Yeah, WTF is this?
Since when is Polymarket’s Twitter account a reliable source of information?
I can't comment on that specifically, but it was reported by pcmag and others
Because AI cannot possibly generate faces.
now it only needs to generate legal documents
not even trying to hide it anymore
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."
I think it more means "we want to sell your face data"
That's not the point of this.
The point of this is to remove unpaid/unauthorized bots. They want their engagement figures to look even better, and they don't want people offering up their ~~advertisements~~ propaganda without paying up.
Their goal will never be to eliminate bots because undoubtedly that is something they want to sell access to and use themselves.
By guaranteeing that certain posts are bona fide humans, their data is more valuable to sell for AI data as well... and they probably have a way to dox users with this too.
JUST IN: Reddit CEO says company is considering requiring all bots on the platform to click on ads in order to drive revenue to Reddit.
I mean it's also trivially easy for ai to make a photorealistic image of a human, i dont see how this could possibly ever work. Whatever test they apply would be by definition cheatable by AI.
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.
Exactly this. The bots are coming from inside the house.
The dead internet isn't a theory on Reddit. It's a reality there. Almost all traffic is
OG “fake it till you make it” business.
Feels like 99% of "social" network startups. The dead Internet theory started before the LLM craze.
Goes back to email. Easier to create a machine that churns out digital messages than find humans to do the work manually. So you get increasing loads of spam and gibberish, attempting to out-shout one another in a digital space with no bureaucratic regulation or material limits.
That said, one thing that made early social media like Facebook and MySpace and Livejournal appear valuable was the degree of human interaction. What's more, the interpersonal networks that formed between verified humans gave enormous value to communications across the platform.
Facebook did a pretty good job, early on, of limiting who could join based on authentication through college admin offices. MySpace had a large cohort of real human artists producing real human music, which attracted a real human following. Livejournal predated a lot of advertisement-by-blogging. After the Dot-Com bubble burst, this is where you could see green shoots of economic value in a digital space.
We've demolished all that chasing fictitious capital. How valuable it was in practice is debatable, of course. But it's all gone now.
Tumblr survived botification largely culturally intact
I'll have to take your word for it
Take mine too. It's really funny how tumblr banned porn so all the gooners went to twitter and now tumblr is kinda healthy with a really vocal userbase that WILL backlash at any attempt on enshittifying the platform
The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO, but he's too busy making everyone distrust Wordpress.
The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO
The ban of every website's existence.
Pretty sure it dates back to the dawn of commerce.
I read somewhere that it's estimated that reddit is 90% bots in the comments, and we already know 99% of front page context is from bots accounts.
If not already, I assume they’ll offer a for-fee API for bots.
I'm glad they violated my account for a non violation and denied my appeal in the first week of opening a new account then. They aren't trying to make their moderation believable, I'm persona non grata for whatever reasons, to appease the administration I presume.
Fuck them, glad I stayed off. I kind of need the help on some stuff though, there just aren't enough people or communities on here yet.
i bet my account is still active somehow; i intentionally violated every rule to get banned during the protest and only 3 or 4 communities banned me; and even then they were just shadow bans.
I was saying a lot of questionable luigi mangione related things after that happened, I couched it all, never came right out saying anything, but that might have caught up with me. That was several accounts ago but they can tell it's you still I hear tell even though I use temporary email to sign up.
Dicey source
So the entire point of reddit, the anonymity, is to be thrown out the fucking window lmao
Considering how "ban evaders," even when changing devices, moving to different countries and setting up new accounts, are getting miraculously detected and swiftly banned again, I doubt anybody has even a shred of privacy on Reddit.
Nah, other users won't know who you are.
But Reddit can sell your information and send police to your house if you joke about Israel.
Nah, other users won’t know who you are.
Well, at least until the database inevitably leaks
https://www.pcmag.com/news/reddit-could-soon-require-face-id-to-prove-youre-not-a-bot
Huffman indicated the platform may use decentralized third-party information providers to verify users’ personal details.
“Part of the promise to users is we don’t want to know your name," he told the hosts. "But we want to know that you're a person.”
Sure, "we don't want to know your name, we just have to know it or have to have another party that we have access to/a deal with know it"
Today everyone throws their principles out the window. Such is the present(
spez is a frigging billionaire. What other principle than making money could possibly have guided him to this point?
Fr
spez has a very punchable face. After that API fiasco that forced many devs out of business, i didnt think i can hate him more till now
Lemme get this straight
foster a website that encourages engagement instead of real human interaction bots flood the website to farm engagement with months and years-old reposts obliterate your API support, causing an exodus of users that use 3rd party apps slowly hemorrhage users while going IPO with your bot site now mandate id checks so we can weed out the bots that made your IPO look so good
Genius play by Spez. (/s)
in order to crack down on ~~AI~~ unprofitable bots
I'm sure they'll have no issues allowing bots that align with their interests
Yeah lol wat
https://openai.com/index/openai-and-reddit-partnership/
That…that doesn’t actually do that.
So when is this happening, so we can mentally and logistically prepare for the next influx of new users into the fediverse?
I think they'll announce it. And we'll have time to prepare for the influx of redditors.
It’s just funny coming from such a new account is all.
My laptop’s TPM requires a pint of blood to allow booting to an OS. Two pints if it’s Linux.
People who make bots will adapt to this more easily than human users will, obviously.
I don't care, because reddit, but this makes me wonder if you can just have an AI generate a generic face and feed that in.
It's obviously not about bots. Isn't spez friendly with Peter Thiel?
You can and it's been done already.
Shitbook wanted photo for a new messanger.com account, so I gave them a nice AI generated one.
I'd rather not use messenger, but I have relatives that do, so am stuck.
What I find amusing is; people that say "hey, let me send you a message on _____" (insert WhatsApp, Insta, FB, Telegram etc) and are aghast when I say "sorry, don't have that. I can do phone or Signal?".
Absolutely, i mean it's gonna be a computer testing the image for "humanity" so of course a computer could cheat the test.
Interesting idea... Is it possible to switch the verification to a bot via a bot. Damn it, when that happens I'll try it out
Lemmyflation is real
it's too late for me to leave reddit. 😔
Me too. I left a couple of years ago 😔️
I suppose I could rejoin, and leave again?
I just did that, for the explicit purpose of entering a subreddit comp. Once that's done, I delete account. Completely mercenary.
Its quite funny to mentally flip the narrative like that. To think of a chat forum as a transactional pipeline instead of ... a place to talk to people. But that's what reddit forces.
Feelsbadman.gif
Assert dominance.
Do it. I can't wait for it.
Maybe we can get more people on the Fediverse lol
Be careful what you phish for.
Ideally a more critical mass so I can talk about my more niche hobbies. Like looking at video game leaks.
Or something like /r/3d6 on reddit.
Maybe we can get more people on the Fediverse
Once there's enough people on the Fediverse it will get noticed by the Authorities and when that happens you'll see instances start shutting down as they are unwilling, or unable, to comply with the Age Verification and Social Media laws that are being passed all over the globe.
I'm somewhat surprised that the NSFW instances haven't already been hit by the Age Verification laws that many US States have but as soon as a single state, say Utah, notices the rest of them will pile on and the Fediverse will start to unravel.
This isn't just a US problem either, there's Age Verification and Social Media laws being proposed or already in effect in many Western Nations. Hell the two Australian instances are already afoul of the laws in their country so as soon as their Government notices they are going to have some difficult decisions to make.
I'd be cautious about seeing that as good news. I'll always be suspicious of how many posts here are either partially or entirely automated, whether that means automatically reposting stuff from other sites, fully generated text, or just augmenting a human's posting.
I like to think we're too small for most botters to care about us, but who knows! As far as I'm aware, no one service has any reliable tools for spotting generated posts. No way are federated services prepared to deal with the insane influx of bots that would naturally come with being significantly more popular. Seems like all we have are captchas...
I can fairly certainly confirm that influnece agents are active on lemmy. Including plenty of US government connected ones ginning up support for the Iran war. Especially on the larger .world accounts it appears.
.world is no different than reddit and anyone on that instance should expect such skullduggery.
I'm on .world and on reddit, and reddit is much, much worse.
It’s amazing seeing the horrible decisions made in the name of quarterly profits
Why long term progress year over year when you can gamble the future on a quarterly line go up.
*** Except Reddit and partner owned bots, which will then have no competition for your attention.
Reddit is a pay to play psyop network, nothing more, nothing less.
What pisses me off about that statement is that it won't even fix the bots. It's public knowledge that most of the bots on the platform are intentional to maintain the image that the site is super popular still, which means those accounts would just get manually verified and skip the process.
It’s public knowledge that most of the bots on the platform are intentional to maintain the image that the site is super popular still
I'm not saying you're wrong and I know many people assume that, but is there a clear source for this?
Making a new Reddit account as a human in 2026 genuinely sucks too most subreddits just automod ban new accounts with low comment karma… but if every popular sub has said automod… yeah. And then 99% of the front page is astroturfed anyway
Because of the current situation, on Reddit I tend to delete my posts older than about a month and then delete my account at least once a year, and register a new one with a randomly generated username.
It’s not because I’m malicious or intend to spam. It’s because I want to participate and to contribute, but am fearful of being arrested for behavior that is in no way violent, threatening, or dangerous, but which may be politically targeted. I don’t want my posts to make me a target, and I don’t want my posts to be tied together.
I use VPNs and block browser fingerprinting.
Before this, I had three accounts that were more than a decade old(one for personal stuff, one for work, and one for NSFW stuff, to keep everything separate).
But there is NO way in hell that I will use Reddit for even one day if there is a face ID requirement.
I don't even see a point in commenting on the current version of reddit anymore (and I haven't for a couple of years). You're either replying to bots or about to get into a useless argument with a bad faith actor. I'll gladly comment on reddit alternatives because it's a better experience for me and it's more likely to get other people to make the switch.
and block browser fingerprinting.
FYI that just makes you stand out like a sore thumb. With the current state of user tracking, it's better to blend in than to look like you're hiding something.
So reddit admin targets me, no permaban because I abandon accounts after a second violation, or a first now, just in the first week, for something not even close to promoting violence that they held up on appeal.
Can I make an anonymous account? Like use a vpn, I already use a temporary email like guerilla mail to sign up. Or could I even use Tor to access? I actually kind of need it for networking on some of my work stuff.
If they said that about Lemmy i would tell them to fuck off but since it's Reddit who cares most of their user base these days are bots anyway, but jfc are they adamant about age verification, they really want to know where are unsupervised children for their new Epstein Island.
If they said that about Lemmy i would tell them to fuck off
Lemmy will eventually be targeted by the various Age Verification and Social Media laws popping up all over the globe. More of them are being proposed and passed every week and the confusion and risk just grow higher.
As an example my home instance, lemmy.today, is run out of Washington State and they have proposed legislation that could impact us. HB2112 and HB1834 are just two examples.
Even if none of them pass in WA, and one of them surely will, it won't too be much longer before the NSFW instances in the lemmiverse start getting targeted by the wide range of States who already have such laws. Instance operators do not have the money to challenge these laws in court so their options will be: comply, shut down, or get fined into oblivion / risk jail time.
I'm not happy about it but in IMO Lemmy is living on borrowed time.
They can just host in other countries
wait wait wait reddit is against AI bots? news to me... https://documentingourdecline.substack.com/p/ai-bots-appeared-after-reddit-partnered
(Why exactly would anyone believe that face ID verification can stop AI bots? Have they seen how well generative AI can generate videos of humans?)
Wow, I knew the problem was bad, but… Jesus. How do we prevent something like this from happening on Lemmy/Piefed if they end up getting really popular? I guess the fact that post history isn’t private here helps
You know you can host your own instance, right? With total population n=1 (just you)? Federating with a micro instance might be difficult but from what ive read, it should be possible - you just need an old laptop to act as your always on server and some know-how.
Yeah but ideally you’d want to federate with the wider fediverse, where there may be bots. Because a social network with population one sounds no fun
It's probably going to be even harder to prevent here because due to federation it's very easy to open multiple accounts across instances and no instance admin has full user data of accounts on other instances...
But it also provides the opportunity to move to instances (and their communities) where the problem is well-managed, if any exist.
It might be harder to manage with federation but, at the same time, it makes corruption more difficult. Reddit is a good example of this. They could manage this problem well but they don’t, because the corrupt overlords that manage it are a single point of failure for the entire network. That would never happen with lemmy/piefed because we could, like you said, just switch instances
We can only hope it keeps being "niche". Right now I wouldn't spend an hour or a buck to make guerrilla-bot-ads here. You need 1000views to generate 1 click. and 1000clicks to generate one sale. Roughly. That shit just wouldn't fly here...YET.
True, but I think it would be a good thing if this place was less niche. The world would be a better place if Lemmy/Piefed surpassed Reddit in terms of total users. Open protocols > corporate overlords. That said the federation aspect of it might make it disjointed enough to maintain that niche feeling. Your particular instance could still be niche even if the wider fediverse is not
Your particular instance could still be niche even if the wider fediverse is not
this is how i use lemmy (and the fediverse to a very large degree) and it gave me my reddit niches back to me.
"Nice" read, thanks for sharing. I miss the interwebz from when it all started. I was there, Gandalf, 3000 years ago!
Killing off bots and people making new accounts after getting banned would leave basically go one left on Reddit.
Spez can eat my ass in hell if he thinks he's getting any more of my info.
So many redditors will become lemmurs
More seriously the biggest problem with lemmy adoption is that it has less content (even if the quality is better), I don't think every niche has enough people who'll bother to set up equivalent communities here and of course there's a learning curve too, but with some organization they could make the switch
Why not start over and create that communities? This was the start of Lemmy, we just copied famous subreddits and do the same stuff over here. Trust me, I was there.
because i am le tired
There's piefed and lemmy and kbin, any of those is good tbh.
ROFL. Man Spez is stupid.
Why are we using polymarket as a source?!
This is just a post from Polymarket. The information was taken from another source, they just posted it.
AAA...HaHaHaHaHa!
"Come on. I want you to do it, I want you to do it. Come on, HIT ME!"
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=24
Hopefully we'll get some more MAU out of this.
I'm not really sure, if "more users" is actually what would be beneficial. More users = more attractive = rising viability of ad-bots. But sure, some more can't hurt :-)
You can't give me gravy and tell me it's Jelly because gravy ain't sweet.
Okay, I think this is just ragebait. The real quote is:
The most lightweight way is with something like Face ID or Touch ID in the family of technology called passkeys; they actually require human presence.
Which isn't even closely the same as requiring manual ID verification. This is about requiring PassKeys with a special biometric confirmation requirement.
