New user here. Just approved and arrived. Greetings and salutations, folks 🙏🏻
If they get rid of the bots, though, there won’t be any more posts.
We dont want those bots here either
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.
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
Get ready for the tankies and other assholes to scare off all the new users again :D
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.
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.
“-We don’t need or want your identity”
LUL
Though I’m new here, lots of communities rules are copypasta from breddit, so what’s honestly different on here?
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!
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’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.
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
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.
Redlib
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!
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
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.
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.
Team Fortress 2 players reliving their PTSD trauma with your comment
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.
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.
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 !
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.
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.
That sounds tempting, but still won’t make me rejoin reddit.
Why did you leave in the first place?
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.
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!
fitting translation for “meta”
When I read “log factory” I was thinking of Splunk or something similar. I’m tired.
Yes. Spelunking in the 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.
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:
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-facial-recognition-distracted-2026-2?op=1
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.
