Reddit Takes On Bots With 'Human Verification' Requirements (techcrunch.com) 75
Reddit is rolling out human-verification checks for accounts that show signs of bot-like behavior, while also labeling approved automated accounts that provide useful services. The social media company stressed that these checks will only happen if something appears "fishy," and that it is "not conducting sitewide human verification." TechCrunch reports: To identify potential bots, Reddit is using specialized tooling that looks at account-level signals and other factors -- like how quickly the account is attempting to write or post content. Using AI to write posts or comments, however, is not against its policies (though community moderators may set their own rules).
To verify an account is human, Reddit will leverage third-party tools like passkeys from Apple, Google, YubiKey, and other third-party biometric services, like Face ID or even Sam Altman's World ID -- or, in some countries, the use of government IDs. Reddit notes this last category may be required in some countries like the U.K. and Australia and some U.S. states, because of local regulations on age verification, but it's not the company's preferred method. "If we need to verify an account is human, we'll do it in a privacy-first way," Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman wrote in the announcement Wednesday. "Our aim is to confirm there is a person behind the account, not who that person is. The goal is to increase transparency of what is what on Reddit while preserving the anonymity that makes Reddit unique. You shouldn't have to sacrifice one for the other."
To verify an account is human, Reddit will leverage third-party tools like passkeys from Apple, Google, YubiKey, and other third-party biometric services, like Face ID or even Sam Altman's World ID -- or, in some countries, the use of government IDs. Reddit notes this last category may be required in some countries like the U.K. and Australia and some U.S. states, because of local regulations on age verification, but it's not the company's preferred method. "If we need to verify an account is human, we'll do it in a privacy-first way," Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman wrote in the announcement Wednesday. "Our aim is to confirm there is a person behind the account, not who that person is. The goal is to increase transparency of what is what on Reddit while preserving the anonymity that makes Reddit unique. You shouldn't have to sacrifice one for the other."
Slowly boiling the frog? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lets see how long this lasts before everyone has to submit to "human verification".
And wonder how long reddit will last when people start moving away cos of this.
Re: (Score:3)
Exactly what I was thinking. Soon you won't be able to scrape anything even if it's not abusive.
Re: (Score:1)
Lets see how long this lasts before everyone has to submit to "human verification".
And wonder how long reddit will last when people start moving away cos of this.
You are far too optimistic to think people will migrate away. Most will just scan their id and face and let scumbag surveillance companies use the data to train their models.
Re: (Score:2)
So this is about AI slop spam from clankers (Score:4, Informative)
If this continues sites like Facebook and Reddit won't have dated sell or advertising that they can even pretend it's worthwhile.
This is why you see all those age verification laws. They are heavily pushed by Facebook because Facebook needs to know who you are. In the past they could do this pretty easily but with modern it deep fakes it's becoming very difficult. Age verification works around that letting them track you perfectly. Also think of the children.
Reddit isn't popular enough or useful enough that they can get people in Mass to verify their IDs. They know this and because of it they will try their best to limit the amount of push they do at least until mandatory age verification is everywhere.
Even then that's probably going to be bad for them because readdit again isn't all that interesting or useful so they're bound to lose users.
Re: (Score:1)
You aren't that interesting either and yet you found a way to look interesting with sock puppet accounts, maybe they'll just do the same.
The problem is that a sock puppet uses an actual human to operate it, while bots run with little or no need for human effort. So a human can turn out a handful of posts with sock puppets, while bots can be churn out thousands and thousands of posts, swamping any system with slop.
Re: (Score:3)
That makes a lot of sense.
I didn't feel suddenly social media sites etc had developed better morals and was suddenly concerned about the content on their site being pushed by bots, misinforming people or making it a waste of time, it's actually because it's messing with their advertising and potential advertising revenue so now they want to push for verification.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure, except the frog isn't as stupid, and will jump out before it boils.
Whereas the reddit populace will swallow it and line up.
Will there be a "validated" badge when everyone is validated?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And wonder how long reddit will last when people start moving away cos of this.
People won't move away because bots get screened. They'll start moving away if the screening process shows too many false positives.
Their bigger risk is financial. If they're honest about getting rid of bots, traffic and subreddit participation will slow thereby resulting in reduced ad revenue and potential and valuation. If they're OK with that, then they'll do well. If, however, their shareholders press them to "increase ad revenue at all costs" then they'll loosen up bot restrictions, claim that the tech
Re: (Score:3)
That frog is long cooked. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Moving to where? Most forums are dead and gone. Genuinely curious.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Slowly boiling the frog? (Score:2)
This does not bode well for me. I'm locked out of my Hertz account because I can't get a high enough score on their CAPTCHA puzzles.
Re: Slowly boiling the frog? (Score:2)
No audio option ? I have completely given up on visual captchas.
Re: (Score:3)
And wonder how long reddit will last when people start moving away cos of this
People are going to move away from Reddit if too many of the posts and comments are made by bots. They're caught in a Catch 22 situation.
If required, I'll delete my account/posts/comments (Score:3)
The day it's required, I'll delete all my posts/comments/.. and my account. Reddit is not required in my life. I can get information and interact with peoples somewhere else.
Re:If required, I'll delete my account/posts/comme (Score:5, Interesting)
The day it's required, I'll delete all my posts/comments/.. and my account.
No, you won't. You'll be locked out because you won't verify your ID. If this is your concern, delete it all now.
Re:If required, I'll delete my account/posts/comme (Score:5, Interesting)
There's no "Delete all posts" button on Reddit, and even deleting your account doesn't delete your posts.
Which means the only way to delete the posts is to go through each one by one.
And what are the chances that a repetitive task like that is going to be seen as "bot like" behavior? 100%?
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Which means the only way to delete the posts is to go through each one by one.
And what are the chances that a repetitive task like that is going to be seen as "bot like" behavior? 100%?
I would assume it's very high, but you could do it in a way that would be less likely to trip the detectors by adding randomness and doing it over a long period. If one starts now, one probably has plenty of time to get it done.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
There's that too. And that adds more problems.
The recommended way to delete all your posts (recommended by privacy advocates, not Reddit) is to edit them to be garbage, and then delete them after that.
The only tools that can do that for you automatically with your likely thousands of posts will almost certainly flag every bot detection algorithm that's written properly.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, using a bot to delete posts will guarantee you look like a bot. That's the problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The day it's required, I'll delete all my posts/comments/.. and my account. Reddit is not required in my life. I can get information and interact with peoples somewhere else.
You may walk away, but the level at which you assume to have control of “your” content, is truly astonishing.
It’ll be downright comical when AI is asked by the Board how to generate more Reddit revenue, and its answer is to restore from backup.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The day it's required, I'll delete all my posts/comments/.. and my account.
Delete your account if you want to, but please don't delete posts and comments. I sympathize wanting to stick it to Reddit and not giving them free content to whore out to AI companies for training, but for the millions of normal people who might get value from comments it's really frustrating.
There are tools to mass-edit all your reddit comments and it's incredibly frustrating to see when people do it. I've thought I finally found the answer to some question or technical problem or whatever in a reddit t
First they came for... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
So it kind of wrecks any meaningful discussion or nerding out.
The trouble is all that is good for engagement so nobody really wants to take it out completely. What Reddit really wants is to be able to tell the bots from the real people so that
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, owners of old accounts would barely recognise any of these sites anymore, so maybe ask if you really need someone to speak for you, or you would instead be begging for a convenient excuse to leave a dying spam filled platform behind.
CAPTCHA (Score:3)
So we're giving up on CAPTCHA then, are we?
And the only alternative we can come up with is literal ID verification?
Something tells me that we skipped a step - i.e. a better CAPTCHA.
Re: (Score:1)
So we're giving up on CAPTCHA then, are we?
And the only alternative we can come up with is literal ID verification?
Something tells me that we skipped a step - i.e. a better CAPTCHA.
Giving up on captcha? Yes, of course, they no longer work.
Skipping a step? Only reading.
"literal ID verification" isn't for human verification or bots, it's only for the countries/states that legally require them, and will be collected regardless how much or little you look like a bot.
Go yell at your government if you live in one of those places.
To verify an account is human, Reddit will leverage third-party tools like passkeys from Apple, Google, YubiKey, and other third-party biometric services, like Fa
Re: (Score:3)
LLMs have made CAPTCHA basically useless. Not to mention the fact I have been flagged as a bot by reCAPTCHA regularly (I guess "Uses Linux and Chromium or Palemoon" makes me a bot even though I did fucking select all the boxes with bicycles, and then traffic lights, and then the boxes that covered a motorcycle, and...")
At this point it's a tool with false positives that real bots can bypass anyway.
This is the nightmare everyone has been warning about, but the powers that be are too gullible (in the case of
Re: (Score:1)
Do we really want mass unemployment and business failures because of a giant con job?
We The People? Not most of us. TPTB? Yes, they sure do. High unemployment is just the thing when you want people to volunteer to be cannon fodder for your endless war.
Re: (Score:2)
No, I'm talking about Google's reCAPTCHA. It's blocked me at least twice. The only way to find out is to change over to the audio reCAPTCHA where it'll tell you you're blocked, otherwise they (sadistically, because nobody other than humans would actually suffer here, so this is more evidence Googlers are shit people) lock you in a loop of visual reCAPTCHAs with no feedback beyond "Try again".
Re: (Score:2)
Reddit has a problem where it adds too much friction it loses users because it's not as useful as site as Facebook.
I'm an introvert so Facebook isn't my thing but people I know who are extraverts or just want to find hobbyists with the same niche hobbies make a lot of use of Facebook to do that. And it does work for that purpose.
But Reddit doesn't have any of that and the bots have kind of made t
Re: (Score:2)
So we're giving up on CAPTCHA then, are we?
CAPTCHA is a fundamentally broken system these days and is doing little to stop bots.
Re: (Score:2)
A few of the numerous references that can easily be found to support this:
unCAPTCHA Breaks 450 ReCAPTCHAs in Under 6 Seconds [bleepingcomputer.com]
Bots are better at CAPTCHA than humans, researchers find [techxplore.com]
AI researchers demonstrate 100% success rate in bypassing online CAPTCHAs [tomshardware.com]
Troy Hunt: Breaking CAPTCHA with automated humans [troyhunt.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Text-based and image recognition-based captchas are trivial for an AI to solve, but what about those weird new captchas that make you do mental rotation tasks?
For example, these:
https://2captcha.com/demo/rota... [2captcha.com]
https://2captcha.com/demo/clic... [2captcha.com]
I think there is still some hope for an evolution in captcha technology.
Re: (Score:2)
Corrected headline - reddit will sell user data (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I've been a reddit user for many years. Even before the release of chatgpt, I knew that I was training a robot.
I liked this idea, because I believed my posts had value and the robot training would be better if it included my posts
Slashdot is already human verified (Score:2)
How about we verify the moderators here? (Score:2)
Or perhaps AI would be better at eliminating dupe posts? There was already a story on this right here just a couple of days ago.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We have verified that the moderators here are less competent than a low-end LLM
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And this is the only comment moderated Funny on the rich target story? Seems to be evidence that your joke is too true to be funny.
I actually have a funny idea about a solution, but it wouldn't be funny to waste much time on it given the current state of the Slashdot. But going for brevity, I think much of what ails us is confusion between "free" in the monetary sense and "freedom" in the important sense of allowing for new and innovative thoughts. From that perspective, the First Amendment needs a rewrite.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems to be evidence that your joke is too true to be funny.
That is exactly the space I am always trying to inhabit. Sometimes I even get there.
Or how about a higher tax rate if the profits are based on proven lies?
Taxing bad behavior is just another variation of the evil bit, or vice versa I suppose.
Well... (Score:2)
I've noticed a trend on Reddit these days, now when someone doesn't like your comment, they say it's an AI post as a way of dismissing it. It would be kind of handy at those times to be able to say "Ha, no - verified human!" I guess that may not outweigh the downsides though.
Human Verification Good; Identification Bad (Score:2)
I'm all for human verification but I would draw the line at proving who I am. I use reddit specifically because it's anonymous enough, assuming you don't post anything personally identifiable.
Re: (Score:2)
"To continue, please enter the number of occurrences of the letter "R" in "Strawberry"
Seems more likely to work than picking photos with bicycles.
sample test (Score:3)
You're walking in the desert, and you spot a tortoise upside down ...
Human responses would be
a) what's a tortoise?
b) which desert?
c) Did I bring sunblock? -- if you're from the Valley
d) Did I tell you about my mother?
Re: (Score:2)
Funny... (Score:2)
Funny that they list 'passkeys' as a proof of human. Peel it back and a passkey is like an ssh keypair. They *could* try to employ attestation to limit to 'blessed passkey vendors', but it's going to be a tough scenario at all.
If folks are determined to 'bot' it up, a pretty legitimate passkey can be part of that. It was never designed to serve the purpose of proving 'human' interaction.
Pay up or wallow in the dump (Score:3)
Bots and other bad actors thrive in free (as in beer) environments, for reasons that should be obvious. If we want to do anything meaningful about them, sites will need a nominal but real fee to use.
It's not what anyone wanted, but "free" was always inevitably going to lead to the Internet becoming a dump. The free ride is over.
In other news... (Score:2)
Moltbook is going to institute a "Prove you're a Robot" requirement.
Fishy means.. (Score:1)
Like the self harm feature, this will also be used to essentially bully and harass people who disagree with the mods and the highly curated, only-allowed opinions of the different reddit subs.
So, fishy just means some mod doesnt like your opinion.