Reddit wants to become bots talking to bots
I think the appropriate headline should be:
“Reddit in talks to embrace iris-scanning Orb to verify users created by man alleged by his own sister to have molested her throughout her childhood beginning at age 3.”
On the one hand, I understand the inherent limitations of pseudonymous social media and why a corporation and even end users might benefit from authoritative user identification.
On the other hand, oh hell no.
I mean, there’s someone here who has (not even exaggerating) 15+ accounts that they just rotate thru.
It’s a hassle to block them all because I still see new ones, but I’ll take that over “proving myself” as a unique person with something like this.
I haven’t seen like any hilariouschaos users in awhile
Exactly. Reddit isn’t my fucking bank. They don’t need to know who I am.
Your bank doesn’t even need to know who you are.
On a related note, Bank of America, if you’re reading this, my name is floop @lemmy.dbzer0.com, and I would like to withdraw all the money from my account. Nonsequential bills please!
Who is floop?
I am floop!
I’m on to you Spartacus!
We are floop!
The banks are legally required to know who you are. It’s part of AML and anti-terrorist financing laws
It’s called KYC or “know your customer”.
Whatcha mean, they obviously need to count the wrinkles on your dirty balloon knot.
- Saved them the trouble.
Wow who’s your butthole guy?
Wtf is this sorcery your post says “1.” but when I reply its “37.”
huh… maybe because of the period and no space? Markdown thinks it’s a list item?
- Lets see
Hum
They don’t even require an email when signing up. At the same time they speed run to biometrics.
What a shit show they’ve become.
As explained, it’s not even quite user identification, but rather verification of a unique individual. The ability to identify that an account is held by a unique person (as opposed to possibility being one of many puppet accounts) is pretty useful, particularly if it’s not possible to backtrace it to an otherwise identifiable person.
Even so, the problem I see with this system is that a person has to be careful to never, ever, ever associate their unique ID with themselves, though there will be constant pressure to do so.
I don’t think psudonyms are an issue, but verifying that a user is an actual person vs an AI chatbot is absolutely something that every popular social media platform will need to tackle at some point.
Why? Internet rules from the days gone by - everyone is a liar. So it shouldn’t matter.
Hmm funny how Sam Altman is one of the few people responsible for creating that problem and now he’s selling the solution to it
It’s actually low-key brilliant. Start a gold rush, when you realize the gold isn’t actually there, pivot to selling shovels and keep hyping the gold rush. Fools and their money are soon parted, and there seem to be an endless supply of them.
He’s a modern day arms dealer.
The bot problem has been around since before Sam Altman was old enough to legally drink. For example in the early days the founders of Reddit were running bots to make the site look wayyy busier than it actually was in order to attract new users.
He’s a convenient bogey-man, and a huge asshole, but he’s the not the source of this problem.
Will they though? Facebook has already created undisclosed bot accounts themselves before. A Platform where real users and such bots are indistinguishable (for the user) sounds like a social media corpos and authoritarian governments wet dream to me. Also reminds me of the attempts to disguise ads as natural content.
Sure but they only want the bots they approve of. That way they can charge for the privilege of allowing someone’s preferred bots onto the platform.
The one Orb you don’t ponder.
lol
lmao, even
don’t kink shame my dude
If World ID becomes one of Reddit’s third-party providers, it would be good news for Tools for Humanity, which was founded six years ago with the lofty goal of providing a universal basic income to the world by offering them cryptocurrency called Worldcoin in exchange for scanning their eyeballs with an Orb.
What the actual fuck.
Seriously how on Earth is that supposed to work?
It’s just a buzzword volly to get people to want to surrender more data. Actually insane premise lmao
I read about this a few years ago, and even saw them in a mall in Western EU.
The whole thing is just bio-data mining, and they started by preying on some poor regions in Africa
Selling data on people is a lucrative business. Although it is a business and not UBI.
Okay I’ve scanned my eyeball and I’ve got some of their worthless cryptocurrency. What about next month, do they want me to scan my eyeball again, because I guarantee it won’t have changed.
So much of what creating privacy busting biometric databases claim to do could be accomplished with speed-of-light geofencing, a.k.a. “distance-bounding protocol”. If a moderator decides messages from country X are problematic, then they can flag/block them for other users. It only requires carefully measuring ping times and basically involves banning traffic from places that can’t achieve certain minimum pings to certain trusted servers.
Drink verification can to continue.
2013, Quasimodo predicted this
Scan your biounique eyeball to provide ID whilst retaining your anonymity???
Anonymity and the ability for someone else to prove it was me are nearly opposites.
I mean, I don’t trust OpenAI or Reddit either but these two things are as mutually exclusive as they seem.
With zero-knowledge principles you could maintain anonymity while still verifying identity. Doesn’t mean that’s what big tech is doing or is gonna do, but also doesn’t mean it’s physically unreal or anything either. We could build a not shitty system.
Biounique id is an advertiser’s wet dream and I don’t think it’s theoretically possible to prevent it from being exploited for profiling by Google. If the hashed encrypted token retains the uniqueness then it points to you as an individual across time, devices and location changes. There is no escaping this ID. You can’t change it, you can’t get a new one.
Google and other multinational corporations WILL know where you live and can figure out all your personal characteristics with a little time. Your anonymity is gone forever.
Sam Altman saw the film Minority Report in which iris scanners on holographic billboards trigger the advertisements to address you by name, hampeting the escape of the central character who was being set up, and thought “Cool, let’s make this. I’m going to be rich! The other dystopian aspects of the film are fiction, but this one I can make real.”
In theory the unique id produced by the scan could be salted by you, uniquely for each website or application, and then provided to the site. This would keep aggregators from being able to track all your activity, or at least it would if they didn’t already have fingerprinting techniques that do it without the need of another unique identifier.
Also look at how FB et al can’t even keep themselves from tracking you all over the internet using all kinds of clever engineering engineering beyond plain cookies.
If it actually becomes ubiquitous, the ability to tie all the anonymous impressions to one person is too tempting for surveillance ghouls.
Identity does not need to be verified by a private company’s scan of someone’s eyeballs.
I’m sorry Dave, I can’t let you post that.
Pondering my deleting my reddit account again
Again? Lol just do it
I really hope this drives a ton of users to Lemmy. I love this platform but it sadly really feels like a 20% Reddit :/
A lot less than 20% when it comes to specific subjects. The great thing about reddit was finding communities around just about every topic or hobby. If 100 people had a passion for something they could meet on Reddit and still have a comfy, somewhat active sub reddit.
On Lemmy you’ve got generic technology, generic news, generic videogames, generic pics, and almost everything else doesn’t get enough traction to keep living. It’s a basic population problem, the fraction of people knowing about Lemmy is just not enough to gather around shared stuff. Even those that do use Lemmy are probably not aware of every community attempt that could interest them.
I still see more communities being abandoned than new ones appearing.
What you describe is the main reason that’s stopping me from 100% leaving Reddit. There isn’t enough variety and there isn’t enough activity in communities that isn’t in the few popular ones. At the moment it feels like +80% of current users fit into a specific demographic.
There are like 60 highly-specific cat subreddits but only 2 general ones on Lemmy.
Wayyyyyy less than 20%.
Even removing, incredibly liberal, bot percentages from reddit Lemmy is still < 0.001% of the audience
It’s a solution to a problem Lemmy will soon have in that case.
Which is bots.
Lemmy isn’t flooded with bots and astroturfing because it’s essentially too small to matter. The audience is something like < 0.001% that of reddit.
Once it grows the problem comes here as well, and we have no answers for it.
It’s a shitty situation for the internet as a whole, and the only solution is verifying humans. And corporations CANNOT be trusted with that kind of access/power
Note: Make the UX on Lemmy even worse to keep the Redditors out!
FUCK no.
I thought this was an onion article or something
Sure…as if they get my bio-data. That company will at best get a 1-way salted hash.