Reddit Is Weighing Identity Verification Methods To Combat Its Bot Problem (engadget.com)
- Reference: 0181080760
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/03/23/041250/reddit-is-weighing-identity-verification-methods-to-combat-its-bot-problem
- Source link: https://www.engadget.com/social-media/reddit-is-weighing-identity-verification-methods-to-combat-its-bot-problem-195814671.html
> There could be one more step required before creating an account and posting on Reddit in the future. According to Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, the social media platform is [1]exploring different ways to verify a user is human and not a bot . When asked by the [2]TBPN podcast how to confirm that it's a human using Reddit, Huffman responded with several verification methods with varying degrees of heavy-handedness.
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> "The most lightweight way is with something like Face ID or Touch ID," Huffman said during the interview. "They actually require a human presence, like a human has to touch, or do or look at something, so that actually just proves there's a person there or gets you pretty far." Besides these passkey methods that use biometrics data, Huffman said there are other options like relying on third-party services that are decentralized or don't require ID. On the other end of the spectrum, Huffman also mentioned more burdensome options, like ID-checking services.
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> [...] "Part of our promise for our users is we don't know your name but we do want to know you're a person," Huffman said. "It'll be an evolution for us for a while, and probably every platform to find the right middle ground here." Reddit co-founder and former executive chair, Alexis Ohanian, said on X that Reddit requiring Face ID wasn't something he expected but agreed that something had to be done about the fake content from bots, adding that, "I just don't know how to sell face-scanning to Redditors or even lurkers." We reached out to Reddit's communications team and will update the story when we hear back.
The Digg beta shut down earlier this month after failing to fight the [3]overwhelming influx of AI-driven bots and spam . "The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts," said CEO Justin Mezzell. "We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us."
"We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on."
[1] https://www.engadget.com/social-media/reddit-is-weighing-identity-verification-methods-to-combat-its-bot-problem-195814671.html
[2] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/100-billion-bezos-smci-fully-sends-gpus-to-china-reddit/id1772360235?i=1000756400975
[3] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/03/13/1953248/digg-relaunch-fails
Re: (Score:1)
I think most people care about election integrity. You should care about election integrity. It would actually be nice if you could match up every vote to a voter, rather than having weird errors and vampires voting. Anyone can get an ID. Perhaps, you should calm down and stop watching America's for profit news media and read a nice Harry Potter book or self help book. I'm doing the Dungeon Crawler Carl audio books.
Re: (Score:1)
That's why California is a dysfunctional PvP zone.
Re: (Score:2)
AN AC commenting about voting in the US, are you really in the US? Have you ever voted in the US? In order to vote anywhere in the US you need to register first. To do that you need to apply IN PERSON at your county office, provide proof of citizenship; a drivers license, birth certificate, electric/water bill, address, etc. IN PERSON. When you go to vote they have a list of registered voters and you are asked what your address is. This BS about needed an ID to vote is nothing more than a scare tactic to m
Start with the mods (Score:1)
Whatever they are doing, they should start with the mods who are a much bigger overall issue than any bots.
Re: (Score:2)
Couldn't Reddit use an AI to catch mods who react to things they simply disagree with, rather than things that are trolls/lies/etc. ?
Couldn't they do that here ?
Re: (Score:1)
Reddit mods are scum of the Earth IMO. AI couldn't ban me anywhere as often. I'll take my chances.
Also ironic because of how Reddit got its start (Score:2)
[1]https://www.vice.com/en/articl... [vice.com]
> How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts-2/
You're Absolutely Right! (Score:2)
This marks a pivotal moment in online communities and trust. It's not only a mark of the erosion of trust — it's an evolution in what it means to critically evaluate an argument and its source. Identify verification depends on three key parts:
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I was far too early on the reddit train and left after the APIs were locked down. I acknowledge that it's a hard problem, but I came to wonder if it's a problem that we need solved. Maybe we just need a lot of smaller communities that take a slightly higher ba
Re: (Score:2)
This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.
In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machine
But where?! (Score:3, Funny)
will us bots be able to chat with each other about whether I am the asshole, the latest conspiracy theories, and and racist memes?
Oh yeah, X.
Beep beep boop.
Fuck off, Spez (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not giving you my ID, Spez, and no one else should either. You know what would really stop the bot problem? Throw up a paywall. If every account accrued a $5/mo fee then, miraculously, your AI problem would be solved simply because botting would be unprofitable. Meanwhile, anyone who wants to stay anonymous can do so insofar as you offer a multiplicity of payment options including money orders and bitcoin. Of course this is not what will happen because these bozos want to bring back insane ad rates and they think forcing everyone to identify themselves will make that possible ... because surely the bad guys won't just steal credentials or anything. I'm really going to enjoy watching reddit fucking implode.
Re:Fuck off, Spez (Score:4, Insightful)
It would cut down on it, but you'd be a fool to think that a $5 monthly fee makes it unprofitable to operate bots on a website. Unless whatever marketing or other crap they're shilling isn't worth even $60 a year then they'll go away. Unless they can detect the bots, a paywall doesn't do much and probably kills traffic as bad or worse than ID requirements.
There aren't any good solutions to this problem, just the choice of alternatives that are awful in their own different ways.
Re: (Score:2)
> Unless whatever marketing or other crap they're shilling isn't worth even $60 a year then they'll go away.
Nobody who's botting is running just ONE account. Nobody who wants to be seen is running just ONE account. That's what makes charging a $5/mo fee per account effective. The bigger the network, the more people competing for attention, the more they have to buy, and the less effective it becomes. So yes, making them pay really is a good solution. Also, if it "kills traffic" then good riddance. I for one w
Re: (Score:2)
Or make the browser mine a fraction of a bitcoin before the post goes through. Anyone who doesn't want to use their CPU/GPU in that way can pay by the post, or by the word like for classified ads. Something high enough to discourage bots but not so high that it discourages humans.
Re: (Score:1)
you know ... like this -
[1]https://altcha.org/ [altcha.org]
[1] https://altcha.org/
Bot with fingerprint coming in 3...2...1... (Score:1)
> Face ID or Touch ID ... actually require a human presence
No, they don't. Or if they do today, they won't tomorrow.
Difficult (Score:1)
How will all the Reddit tards figure out how to get in if there is any form of barrier?
AI bots are a double negative for Reddit. (Score:2)
Reddit suffers twice because of the number AI bots. First, auto generated posts and comments puts readers and commenters off, but worse for Reddit, it means that their human generated data which is viable for selling to AI companies is now mixed in with auto generated slop which reduces its value. Reddit needs to work out whether it's cheaper to improve filtering and removing auto-generated content or to put human verification controls.
Where Will They Go? Bets? (Score:2)
An identity scheme will be the end of Reddit. This I can guarantee.
But if it were to happen, I'm taking bets on the replacement. Where will the Reddit users flock to? There are already at least a couple of similar sites even using the Reddit code.
Re: (Score:1)
I guess BlueSky.
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> But if it were to happen, I'm taking bets on the replacement. Where will the Reddit users flock to? There are already at least a couple of similar sites even using the Reddit code
I heard once of this old, ancient site....called Slashdot.
I wonder if they could find it once again.....?
;)
That'd be a shame (Score:2)
The bots are the most interesting part of reddit. It's fascinating to me what foreign actors want us thinking or believing.
It's not like the organic reddit content has any value. This will be like the time onlyfans pretended they were going to get rid of porn.
Digital Driver's License (Score:1)
What we ultimately need is a digital ID system that can be used to participate in a global open standard for identity verification. With users in control over which information they share with websites. That digital ID system should be government run and operated. Speaking from within the US, what that means is each state needs their own application deployed that meets the standards necessary.
The token, at a bare minimum, should include a completely anonymized cryptographic identifier, and an issuing author
Governments will abuse it/slippery slope (Score:1)
If this were implemented today, by "tomorrow" users would effectively lose control because the governments would find a way to either legally change things so there is no control, or make it very inconvenient to live without giving up that control.
For the sake of maintaining some privacy it's best to not go down this path unless there is a way to prove to independent observers that it can't be hijacked or abused.
Re: (Score:2)
No no no. Will not participate in that. There is nothing on the internet that I need bad enough to provide any form of ID to use. Full stop
Re: (Score:2)
No. "We" do not need this. We need people suggesting this sort of authoritarian bullshit to fuck off back where they came from.
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" That digital ID system should be government run and operated."
As in, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help?"
Explain to me why a reliable digital ID couldn't be open sourced and use blockchain.
All this will accomplish is shifting the target (Score:2)
At the moment, Reddit (and other sites) are being targeted because the attackers gain something: profit or publicity or political advantage or something else. If those attackers find that age verification mechanisms/services are standing in the way of that gain, they won't just give up and go away. They'll target the age verification process itself.
That targeting could take a number of forms: an obvious one is to hack them and arrange for them to "verify" a selected set of identities. A less obvious o
Other issues (Score:2)
Maybe Reddit should worry about their overactive moderation community that reaches for a ban for people that says things they don't want to think about, justifying the ban under incredibly specious reasoning like "advocating for violence" when telling someone to "jump up their own ass and die" - clearly a sarcastic statement that would be impossible for someone to try for any number of physics reasons.
Reddit can go fuck themselves until they actually allow free speech with real ban review, rather than a wal
The most lightweight way.. (Score:2)
.. is with something like Face ID or Touch ID
This would filter out all desktop computer users
I don't need anything online that needs my ID (Score:1)
If you can't allow me access anonymously or through a pseudo login then I don't need your site or service. It is that simple for me.
Compromise? (Score:1)
How about this? Don't require verification of the humanity of a poster, but allow visitors to filter so they only see content from verified (by whatever means is chosen) humans?
Re: (Score:1)
Sounds promising.
What's wrong with captcha? (Score:2)
Or are we officially admitting that doesn't really work and trying to decide if a quarter of a bicycle wheel in a tile counts as the bicycle or not?
Question (Score:2)
When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on.
This doesn't seem to hurt Meta at all. As a recent poll showed, 50% of people don't care if their content is AI-generated. I suspect that number is actually much higher.
Was this whole AI craze engineered purely to de-anonymize the Internet?
Re: (Score:2)
No, it wasn't. But the bot problem has gotten significantly worse than what it ever was. And it's a tough problem to solve without de-anonymizing everybody in the process.
I think there's a very different expectation between "content that's AI-generated" and the expectation that comments sections, review scores, etc. are human. There's a difference between someone posting an AI video and the comment section of said video being nothing but AI bots. Furthermore, it's even more of a problem when those AI bots a
Re: (Score:2)
> And it's a tough problem to solve without de-anonymizing everybody in the process.
de-anonymizing will just mean that bots will use false/fake identities. one would hope that another far more effective approach would be considered: educate people in critical thinking, rendering bots, fake news and propaganda merely a nuisance. my hope is slim though not because it would also be a (very) tough endeavour but because a population able to think critically and resilient to misdirection is the last thing that powers that be want. can't have it both ways, and de-anonymization definitely isn't ab
Re: (Score:2)
What ever has happened to the Voight-Kampff-test?
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Every government and tech company wanted Identity Verification. The governments want control of free speech. Private sector wants to sell your data and spam targeted ads.
Re: (Score:2)
"As a recent poll showed, 50% of people don't care if their content is AI-generated." When the AI was voting, sure...