Reddit hasn’t cared about bots for years. They just want your ID.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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This isn't an ID push (yet). Seems more like a vapid announcement to appease the corpos paying them for ads.
If you remove all the bot users from reddit, there will be only one user left, and they will say "Fuck u/spez"
Nothing to do with "Fishy accounts". If you're account is actually deemed a bot account by Reddit, then you're doing something right. Your privacy settings are working if they can't distinguish between you and a bot.
It's an umbrella term and should really say "eventually, all accounts" as they just want you to break your secure privacy settings and let them harvest your data.
I expect “fishy accounts”, in practice, will mean accounts that criticize Israel, Musk, Thiel, etc or support Palestine, Iran, trans people, Lemmy, etc.
It’ll be a vague, catch all for accounts they don’t like the same way conservatives use pedophile. The actual bots, like actual conservative pedophiles, will be protected.
Your privacy settings are working if they can’t distinguish between you and a bot.
It seems to me like bot behavior should stand out in a bunch of ways that have nothing necessarily to do with privacy.
I mean it that's their reasoning for wanting your ID/to prove you're a human life force.
If they can't tell the difference, fuck 'em.
Obviously they should be able to, but if that's their reasoning, you're doing something right.
If they can't tell the difference, then it at least makes sense for Reddit to want to invoke greater scrutiny and some level of 'anti-bot' testing. I agree the ID thing sounds like a slippery slope, but at least one can say it has some degree of defensible reason.
Altho personally, I'm thinking it would be better to require a bot account to pass certain dynamic tests that couldn't be easily programmed against. That said, the rise of AI tools probably makes that something of an arms race...
Reddit itself deploys bot accounts to shill for paying advertisers. It's in their TOS. This isn't about bots, it's about controlling the narrative.
So glad I found Lemmy. Kindof sad to see the direction Reddit is headed, but I think it was inevitable once profits became the driving force.
Oh, and Fuck Spez! That is all.
There on Reddit that you don't have here. Here we have entire instances of bots like Mastodon.uno
They're using bots to try to flag bots, and the whole shell game is going to devolve into false positives driving away the humans while bots play the sideboard games to look human.
Fun fact if they can target you with ads, one day they will target you with bombs.
I've quit Reddit because I kept being shadow banned for no good reason, had original content made by me removed for "repost" while they completely ignored my complaints of bots blatantly reposting content I had made myself. I think it's my complaints that triggered the shadow bans.
Most subs I frequented were also constantly spammed with obvious bots posting ads, plus other bots shilling the product they were selling in the comments and nothing was ever done about those.
That was years ago. I can only imagine it got worse since with AI.
Most probably the accounts targeted will be the legitimate ones.
Bot crackdown = crackdown against those opposing the war & Israeli colonialism