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.
I mean, requiring FaceID is a horrible idea, but there maybe might be a better alternative (I’m talking about the general idea of a “proof of humanity” online, not specifically using this solution).
The fact of the matter is that bots are a massive issue online. When russia got sanctioned and cut off from the western Internet, r/Conservative went radio silent for a couple of days - until they figured out how to VPN through the Netherlands. There are whole communities where bots discuss bot-posted content. And I have no doubt in my mind that it will also happen on Lemmy as soon as there’s even a hint of profit* to be found.
* “profit” not as in “monetary gain”, but as “any kind of gain, be it money, influence, propaganda, chaos”, etc., etc.
Every so often r/conservative traffic dies down and the subreddit turns much more centrist. It’s never liberal by any stretch but you’ll actually see lots of criticism poke through. Same thing happens with r/politics occasionally. Reddit is just astroturfed so heavily that there isn’t a point to it anymore. You have worse than a coinflips odds on replying to an actual human.
Worldcoin requires you to use their Orb device to sign up, and you can buy a verified account for $20.
There are alternatives we could use.
A bunch of European countries already have “e-IDs” that can share very limited data with a service provider. For instance, Sweden has “Bank ID” (ID generated by you bank), which you can use to, for example, sign in to your housing association’s website. This gives them your name and registered address, immediately giving you the site for your particular community.
You could use a system like that to send only the “this is a human” token. Potentially also “this is an adult”, without giving away any of your personal details, including your date of birth.
Why not use the bots to build bot detectors or categorize places online that are heavily botted, look for patterns and collect data for others to research.
Because they don’t actually want to do that. Having open platforms means actual conversation happens and that’s poison to authoritarians.
It’s a LOT easier to make bots fake being human than it is to detect bots faking being human.
So a computer can’t ever truly generate a random number but it can generate total random dialogue.
I think we just didn’t make an effort to catalog and look hard enough to identify these patterns.
I feel like if we started to truly look at the most obvious place we could see a lot of things that can be used to identify.
Think of it this way: there are billions of types of online interactions where detection is either impossible (an image or link post) or extremely difficult (general conversation where sometimes even humans don’t sound like humans due to slang/education/etc).
Not only that, you’d end up with a “tug of war” where the existence of such detectors would power the improvement of the bots, which would require the improvement of the detector (which is always more difficult).
And the other option is an anonymous token that defines you as a human user. Which is simpler and cheaper to implement?
I think you’re wrong. Completely wrong. There are billions of messages but any intelligent person knows you don’t go through each one by one.
Do you ever see those guys who can look at a picture of a tree in a field and identify where it is in the world. There’s billions of trees. How do they do that with precision?
Classification.
They can train their bots on whatever they want. The human is smarter. If they tune them, you use the methods and knowledge learned and adapt. Like generating random numbers, there’s limits almost always. You don’t find them by inaction.
4chan a website full of racist, neo nazi and pedophiles were just goofing around and they do insane OSNIT research. Lemmy is fucking around with beans and moths. I don’t know. I’m just saddened by the state of things and how much better everybody else is at things I always thought the left was good at. It’s just been eye opening to see.