this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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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.

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[–] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

So, you want to hire hundreds of thousands of moderators? The human is smarter, yeah, but not the bot doing the detection.

I don't know where this is coming from. Nobody is being hired. If anything I'm becoming more anti-mod lately. I feel like put boxes on things that suck oxygen out of the room rapidly. But that's a different discussion.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong but to clarify I am not saying we need to build our own bot detection but I would be a nice have eventually. I am saying we should be crowd sourcing our collective anger and ADHD or Autism or whatever drives us to post bean moth lemmy slop and instead focus on collection of the worst bot infestations. There are patterns. Bots are not random enough that they can't be identified with large crowd sourced efforts. They're also in their infancy which means it will only get harder going forward.

You or I aren't able to avaliable accurately tell right now. Have you ever seen the Sinclair news video? The one where every news station repeats the same dialogue. Can you or I flip on the news any day of the week and call that out, unlikely. But we can logical understand it is something that happens. It becomes obvious there is a script only when you collect the data and begin to analyze it. That is what I'm saying we need to figure out and gamify.

Name generation, text, patterns. At the start it won't be accurate. But as more data is collected it'll become obvious. If the bots were that good, these websites would have left their APIs open. But they closed them so we can't collect this data. I'm the type of person when powerful people do something like that, I want to know why and work around that. It's not a coincidence that they locked their sites up when people were given tools where anyone could collect data and feed it into AI for analysis.

Our inaction to do anything when the greatest opportunities are right in front of us but slipping away is a tragedy of this generation.

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I am saying we should be crowd sourcing our collective anger and ADHD or Autism or whatever (...) and instead focus on collection of the worst bot infestations.

That's what "being a moderator" is, mate. You want hundreds of thousands of moderators.

There are patterns. Bots are not random enough that they can’t be identified with large crowd sourced efforts

You're wrong.

It becomes obvious there is a script only when you collect the data and begin to analyze it.

You just said:

I am not saying we need to build our own bot detection

So, which is it?

It becomes obvious there is a script only when you collect the data and begin to analyze it.

There's a massive difference between local news stations receiving a script to read out, and a bot farm having a "be negative, unfriendly, sow chaos" instruction.

At the start it won’t be accurate

So, it just won't work? Got it.

But as more data is collected it’ll become obvious

I don't think you undersand what you're talking about. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be contrarian here, I just honestly think that your idea of "AI bots" is kind of like "we have prepared one million sentences, and now our bots will be picking between them to generate whole posts on social networks".

I mean, sure, there can be patterns - like the whole "LinkedIn post" style, where most of the time it's fairly obvious that you're reading an AI-generated slop... But that's not what state-entities or even just hackers use. They have access to much more sophisticated content.

If the bots were that good, these websites would have left their APIs open.

Reddit's API is no longer open. Didn't do a thing to stop bots.

But they closed them so we can’t collect this data

You don't need however many API keys to collect that kind of data. At least not from Reddit.

Our inaction to do anything when the greatest opportunities are right in front of us but slipping away is a tragedy of this generation.

Your proposed action is the equivalent of Sisyphus and his stone. Because you really seem to be forgetting that the AI tech is getting better all the time. And that any AI-detection actions you take feed that process. "Oh, they've detected these posts? OK, let's tweak the algo until we get through and then flood them with our content".

Let's even assume that you somehow pull it off and get a 100% detection rate as of right now. Six months down the line that will go down to 20%. Etc. etc. And you'll be catching thousands of legitimate users in the crossfire.

An anonymous "proof of humanity" token solves all AI issues without anyone having to spend billions on research and manpower.

[–] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

It's just building and gamify strategically. There's no magic here. It works. Bots can adapt all they want. They're still constraint and limited by technology and money.

What is magic is humans ability to use inference and deduction to see things that are not right in front of us. It's hard to see this online especially the way some conversations go.... but regardless of that, people could easily detect patterns that are used in the wild. We just need data. Lemmy communities are perfectly set up for this for now.

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

It’s just building and gamify strategically. There’s no magic here. It works. Bots can adapt all they want. They’re still constraint and limited by technology and money.

How much of what I wrote so far was done via an LLM?

[–] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

That's not the point. There is no issue with random people using LLM to craft their messages. The issue is using a network of bots to promote the latest marvel movie. Draw attention to the latest political blunder. Or just groups trying to push people further to the edges politically until nothing works.

Look at this fucking guy. Likely not a bot. But is an example of someone who is posting pattern is suspicious. It needs to be studied. That's something we can't do. But we can collect and analyze in a way that i think people can get into. I think using the internet and sites like lemmy for this is way more effective any most stuff people are trying to do. This he what the internet was made for and the only people not using it for this seems to be leftist groups.

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Look at this fucking guy. Likely not a bot. But is an example of someone who is posting pattern is suspicious

You have just defined why your method doesn't work.

There is no issue with random people using LLM to craft their messages. The issue is using a network of bots to promote the latest marvel movie

You either detect AI by their language or you don't.

But, I think, I know what you mean. Your idea is like Bat-sonar, the super-totally-not-magical computer he built in the second or third Nolan film that allowed him to spy on everybody and thus detect crimes faster.

You want a system that would monitor ALL content online and detect "patterns". Like, "huh, weirdly, we have XXX number of people writing positively about the new JJ Abrams film", or "check it out, in the past hour we've had 43243 comments negative about MAGA".

Right?

If so: mate... You require literal magic to pull it off. WAY too many false positives or just impossible to trace dependencies. You would have to not only monitor for these patterns, but also associate them with any real-world events (ALL events), because maybe a Polish nationalist politician said something about the financing methods of their military, which got popular on russian Twitter, got a funny anti-MAGA retweet by a Ukrainian, ended up as a reaction video on British TikTok, and got posted to Reddit where it got upvoted to r/All and received 43243 100% legitimate comments complaining about MAGA.

Funnily enough, if anything, MAYBE a complex enough AI system would be capable of finding these patterns, but there's absolutely no physical possibility of humans doing that.

[–] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Hey,

What do you think crowd sourcing means. Like what is your definition in relation to building whatever it is you're describing. How did you get there?

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

What do you think crowd sourcing means

It means a bunch of people doing working in very narrow fields that need to be connected by someone with an overarching view, but there are so many so small fields, that it's impossible for a human to handle. In this particular case.

Unless you figured out telepathy. Then I retract my statements - a large enough network of directly connected telepaths could do this.

[–] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 0 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

No it doesn't. That's not it. And this is how i know you're just a terminally online individual arguing out of instinct rather than common sense. Il not be commenting further.

But to my point. Crowd sourcing these things works. It's a missed opportunity in these early days to be passive and more concerned with bean posts.

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 0 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

You just replied with a "nuh-uh!" and call me "terminally online"? That's a good one.

You seem know a bunch of buzz-words that you don't fully understand, like "crowd sourcing" in this instance. It's like a magic wand, "just crowd source it, and it'll just work", without realising that - again, unless telepathy is involved - a crowd is still just a bunch of individuals. Without instantaneous real time communication no single individual can spot such a massive pattern as those you are after. Without spotting the "big picture", the whole thing is pointless.

[–] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

You can't just magically call everything magical in an attempt to discredit and expect anyone thing you're anybody but dishonest. I'm not spending the evening attempting to keep you on track when you can't be bothered to read and instead you're just looking for bullshit arguments and at worst attempting to discredit for whatever personal reason you have.

[–] Alaknar@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Again: you're throwing buzz-words around as if they're explanation enough. I'm calling your thinking magical because it is.

Prove me wrong by explaining how do you envision coordinating "crowd sourced pattern spotting" (something that has never been done in the history of mankind, because it "crowd" and "pattern spotting" are almost direct opposites).

There are no "personal reasons" for me saying what I'm saying, nor are my comments "attempts at discrediting". There's literally nothing to discredit here, mate.