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.

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.

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🤔

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.

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.

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.

So what's will happen to their existing bot accounts? Erase 75% of their current users?

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).

Every other website:

They should start with all the commenters in the thread praising the Spez.

Psst ,we humans left reddit in 2023

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).

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 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'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.

Get ready for the tankies and other assholes to scare off all the new users again :D

Without bots their most popular text based subs like AITAH or TwoHotTakes would be empty.

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.

Something tells me that won't end well for them.

Will reveal how much their population is bots.

If Reddit loses all the bots, they will literally lose more than half of their activity, especially in an election year.

And none of them will know about fediverse girl

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.

For some reason, most of the responses welcome that decision!? I guess the others were banned.