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?
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.
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.
Name one way
How about at a random interval once every couple months it will ask you to draw a picture of a cat in the browser and if it finds your drawing process too similar or the image too similar to one that’s already in the database it will flag it without telling you. Three strikes and your out kinda rule. It’s like drug tests but for the internet.
Even if you did, like, a line across the screen to save time there’s no way in hell it’d be the same as anything else in that database unless you are extremely unlucky.
Captchas back in the day were solved by humans in bot farms. Yes they are humans but not the right ones.
That was kinda my idea with the whole random and unexpected checking in. It’s easy to get humans to do it for bot farms when you have deterministic times in which you’d have to perform the captcha. Nowadays most simple captchas can be done by bots so I was brainstorming a way you could make it harder for the bots while being minimally intrusive to the user.
Sorry dude, but this comment makes it clear you have no idea what you’re talking about. If I’m given an assignment to write a program that generates a huge variety of novel cat drawings, which won’t register the same in this database, I bet I could personally single handedly have that done in a week of work.
Some other problems :
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Many real humans will draw roughly similar cats. Unless you compare the drawings pixel by pixel, or very precisely, then there will be lots of false positives.
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If you then decide to compare the drawings pixel by pixel or very precisely, then I can trivially generate new drawings by altering them. I have plenty of time to reverse engineer how your database is comparing things even though you don’t tell me when I get a strike because I can make lots of fake accounts via hiding my IP address and run experiments by feeding different variations of drawings and seeing which ones eventually get banned.
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If you ask once every couple of months, then my bot gets to do three times whatever that duration of months is worth of damage and misinformation before it gets banned. That’s a pretty long time, especially for a bot. I can deploy new bots much faster than your system gets rid of them.
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As Anivia pointed out, I can pay real humans to draw the different cats for my bots when needed. This is especially trivial because I can just ask them to draw a whole bunch of cats in advance. I don’t even need to wait for the cue from the system. I can just have a big library of pre-drawn cat drawings that I upload as needed.
Cool, you don’t have to be a dick about it. :P I already know that I don’t know much about but I wanted to make a suggestion because the guy asked.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be a dick, just being honest. I felt it was important to correct your unjustified confidence in the original comment where you claimed many such solutions exist
But why do you need to talk down to me like I’m an idiot instead of just correct me politely? I’m genuinely curious because it seems to be a very common thing nowadays where percieved confident incorrectness and ignorance is met with distain and anger. I didn’t mean to offend anyone when I made this comment and was simply brainstorming while bored at work.
Let me first clarify that I think you seem very nice and I’m not mad at you, nor do I have any intent to make you feel bad. I think you’re misreading my tone, tbh. That or I’m expressing my tone poorly.
So, I thought I did correct you politely, within the bounds of also needing to make very clear and unambiguous that you needed to adjust your confidence when talking about this subject. I have no issue with someone idly brainstorming ideas, but in the context of your original comment “There are so many ways to do human verification that have worked for years.”, which you didn’t qualify in any way, you sounded completely authoritative and sure of yourself. Since you yourself even know that you are ignorant on this topic, to me a better phrasing would be to preface that with something like “I think…” Or “It seems like…”, or even outright saying “I don’t really know about this stuff, but…” Etc.
Because you made a dumb claim with confidence. You were talked down to because you were acting like a fool. Which you’re still doing btw.
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Place age-verification on routers and keep it there.
Just open it all up to everyone. Fuck it. There’s a point we all just get bored of it
Wait, the guy at the top of the chain asked human verification, not age verification…
Any verification is wrong. Like everything in life, it will only impose a restriction on people who don’t have the ability to circumvent it at best. The only reason this would go forward is if it can be used against those people somehow. Data collection. Censorship.
Need to go the other way. Lean in not away. Look at why bots exist. Find ways to jam that system up. Like if it’s a bot trying to promote a new movie. Every comment should be shitting on that movie. If it’s a bot in November trying to post the latest drop ship night light star projector on r/coolstufftotallynotjustads well I’m pretty sure my cousin bought that lamp and was the reason his house burned down. For a couple years let’s fuck it all up. Make the internet inhospitable to politics, business, advertisers. If it’s some racist Facebook group, they pay ads to promote their bot group, so post it here on lemmy and report spam the group since they use bots to moderate. Chase them the fuck out. If they try to stop us it’ll cost them millions and us nothing to find new ways. Their option is to either restrict us to the point their platforms suck or they have to increase the number of bots costing them more and more and more until it’s not worth it. Go to fucking war with them and take the internet back instead of going the route of giving DNA samples to some 3rd party owned by meta just to look at porn.
I don’t know. I’m just done with it all. I like to image a world 20 years ago where we all saw the internet moving towards corporate interest and we chased them out. Instead they now create a problem and sell the solution and we all clap and fucking cheer
Hitler was much easier to kill as a baby. That’s all.
After I posted this I came across a topic that is likely filled with bots pumping it. Get in early. Look for indicators. Tag and bag them. But there’s needs to be some type of community for this. Like a scambaiters
“Famous Influencer Druski under flame for doing “Whiteface” after a video of him making fun of Erika Kirk surfaced online…”
deleted by creator
Every other website:
Websites should copy VKontakte and make the user line-up several words in Cyrillic. It’s the hardest one I’ve ever had to pass, it has to be exactly in the right place 😂
Like a sliding puzzle from Hell.
Doesn’t that make it a bad test? It should be easy for humans and hard for machines.
It’s going to get to the point where anything easy for humans will be easy for machines too.
Or Cloudflare.
So what’s will happen to their existing bot accounts? Erase 75% of their current users?
if ip.geolocation == "Langley, VA": verifyUser()Lmao hopefully
They should start with all the commenters in the thread praising the Spez.
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.
The good news is that if the fediverse gets an influx of Redditors, maybe we’ll see some of those niches pop up here too. Reddit’s impending identity theft coupled with the insane enforcement of rule 1 they’ve been doing lately is what got me to make my account here.
my little hometown somehow had a subreddit. i don’t know how
Honestly I’m from the time where there used to be forums for these things and I liked forums just fine.
Same. I think it we moved back to forums the internet experience would improve
Agree. Another benefit is, it’s much less productive to use info-warfare bots against a small forum of let’s say 500 users, than against a global site with 1B users.
Yeah I think big hubs are too problematic.
I miss r/fitness. It was big enough but good enough to learn a lot and get motivation.
I miss the TV episode discussions. Even if I wasn’t following live, I could go read the thread and feel the shared excitement and read the theories and there was always something I hadn’t noticed that someone else had.
I miss those the most.
Yeah I also liked the show subs where people theorized and discussed details.
Similar vein to forbidden snacks was don’t put your dick in that. Yeah I miss the niche subs too, don’t miss the rest of the bullshit tho.
E. Ask historians was also high grade.
In my infant span of figuring out how to get on here, there are some charms here like foodporn being on the main server, and shittyfoodporn being exclusively on the Canadian one.
Okay that’s pretty funny
I wish there was a more active general gaming community here. I just migrated over from reddit, and haven’t found one that isn’t a ghost town.
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).
Blorp dev here. Let me know if there is anything I can do to make the app even better for you!
Keep it up, you’re awesome!
hey, nice to meet you here! I was wondering if it’s a problem that only I have or if it’s still in development but I have issues playing videos inside blorp. Could you please help? I really like blorp’s UI and I don’t want to change.
Nice to meet you too! Could you be more specific? Which type of video are you trying to play? If you’re unsure, could you send me a link to the post? Either here of via private message.
Video playback could definitely be improved in general, though it’s a bit tough because there are like 5 different types of video embeds and they all work a little different.
for example, I tried to play this video but it didn’t work.
not sure if the problem is on my side or not.
https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.world/post/44647866
EDIT: I forgot to thank you for your help and time, it’s nice to see devs so dedicated to their projects
Found the issue. Good catch! Will fix in the next release.
THANKS, I’ll update as soon as possible.
Out of curiosity, why foes F-Droid warn about anti-features?
The F-Droid maintainers added that. It’s probably my fault for not explaining my app well. At the time, I just really wanted to get Blorp on F-Droid, so I didn’t make any sort of argument against the anti feature labels. After that, my focus was mainly on improving the app itself, and I never went back to ask them to change it.
But you’re not the first person to mention this. I should probably fix it.
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 think there was a big shift for reddit in 2016 after they bought (and then shut down…) AlienBlue and then launch their official app. That moment it felt like when the number of users just exploded, but with that, the quality of posts (and average age of the user) dropped.
Lemmy/the fediverse reminds me of 2010-2015 reddit (which is a good thing!)
I remember when Reddit was run out of spez’s Somerville apartment on a little PC. No subreddits, just one top page. Terrible performance and no users. Everyone was at either Slashdot or Digg. Even Kuro5hin by then was dead. Reddit beat Digg because Digg got stupid and abused their community. Reddit is a million times worse now than Digg ever was.
Yup! I was a part of the mass Digg exodus.
I figured that would happen again with reddit, but to my disappointment the internet is a much different place than it used to be.
There was a competitor of Digg to flee to. Reddit, and the other social media platforms, solved that problem with anticompetitive practices to prevent a migration they previously benefitted from.
Agreed. I remember leaving MySpace for Facebook (shit I even remember Xanga before MySpace).
At some point, it felt like the internet just got smaller, became 5 websites. And on those 5 websites, you’d find something like: a picture of a tweet posted to reddit and the tweet is about an instagram post"
Really disheartening as someone who came up with the “wild west” internet (which definitely had its issues, but it felt like human issues, not corporate issues)
What anticompetitive practices? I figure it is more just a matter of userbase inertia: they already have the huge user base, so other forum user bases are small which makes people not want to migrate there.
Back when Reddit was funny and not a bot hive
I remember /r/AskReddit being THE spot, and it was great to read on the go since it was just text. All the novelty accounts were awesome, RamblesOffTopic being a favorite of mine haha.
…and r/conspiracy was 80% stuff like birds ain’t real and the rest I always assumed was people posting ironically… now I’m not so sure that that was an accurate assessment.
and r/F7U12. It wasn’t just a meme it was an entire meme language, kids these days with their gifs and their template sites… smhing my head
I use user tags pretty heavily, and it is amazing how small Lemmy truly is. I recognize a lot of individual users, and the tag even links back ti whatever post/comment I originally used to tag them.
That’s how the OG Internet communities were. There would be like 500 total people maybe and you’d see them randomly throughout the week as they were online. You don’t know everyone but you recognize most of the names/pfps.
It cuts down on a lot of toxicity when you can actually know who is a jerk and who is probably just having a bad day. It makes the community a bit more empathic and less reactionary.
Indeed!!
As a side tangent, I used to get so mad on old forums when someone would update their avatar lol I didn’t recognize names, I recognized their picture. So if they changed they might as well be a new user until I recognized we’ve spoken before, haha.
I know! I paid an artist, from the forums, to draw my avatar and paid them to update it for holidays and stuff so it was consistent.
Also, you gotta have a good signature. Why not a live updating image of what is playing in your media player, that could not possibly end badly.
Guy, never forget that internet was built for porn and sarcasm, later renamed trolling, and you’re supposed to have higher than room temperature IQ to be here and properly enjoy it.
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.
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.
Let’s go! We can all make Lemmy better.
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!
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.
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?
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.
People who are “scared off” by leftwing politics are probably happier elsewhere anyway
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.
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 !
And none of them will know about fediverse girl
Do you mean Anubis?
That uses POW which wastes time and CPU, however it does essentially nothing to stop bots, it just makes them slower.
You need to detect the fingerprints of things like Selenium and Multilogin as well as the fingerprint of the whole browser or device to truly stop them.
If I remember right her name was Nicole
Discord did the same thing didn’t they?
Also reddit heavily used bots to fill they site with posts for years. They were one of the biggest ones. Kiss my ass reddit
