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Reddit and FaceID Verification
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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There's no way they want to eliminate bot traffic, it would kill 2/3rds of their traffic instantly. So this just means, "bots that aren't paying us."
Reddit, very famously, used bot traffic at its inception to create the illusion of a community big enough to compete with Digg.
It was the OG "fake it till you make it" business.
As the company implements an increasingly draconian "ban every account that looks at me sideways" admin policy, I'm not sure if "2/3rds of the traiffc" isn't lowballing it. There are entire threads - from initial post to bullshit bottom comment - that get created by bot traffic on the modern site. It's a full blown hall of mirrors over there.
Feels like 99% of "social" network startups. The dead Internet theory started before the LLM craze.
Goes back to email. Easier to create a machine that churns out digital messages than find humans to do the work manually. So you get increasing loads of spam and gibberish, attempting to out-shout one another in a digital space with no bureaucratic regulation or material limits.
That said, one thing that made early social media like Facebook and MySpace and Livejournal appear valuable was the degree of human interaction. What's more, the interpersonal networks that formed between verified humans gave enormous value to communications across the platform.
Facebook did a pretty good job, early on, of limiting who could join based on authentication through college admin offices. MySpace had a large cohort of real human artists producing real human music, which attracted a real human following. Livejournal predated a lot of advertisement-by-blogging. After the Dot-Com bubble burst, this is where you could see green shoots of economic value in a digital space.
We've demolished all that chasing fictitious capital. How valuable it was in practice is debatable, of course. But it's all gone now.
Tumblr survived botification largely culturally intact
I'll have to take your word for it
I'm no heritage Tumblr user, I didn't have an account until about a year ago, but I used to browse the site every now and then. I'd say the current userbase is a joy to be around, but the bots are everywhere. Every comment section on an artist's post eventually will get a "Are you open for comms?" post. We still get the porn bots funnily enough. Also the occasional account takeovers and then bots DMming people.
But like in terms of real people posting? I don't even know if I've ever had a bot post come up on my feed, for both the following feed and "for you" feed. Plus Tumblr does have an option to look at chronological posts and you can actually reach the end of the page eventually!
We all recently rioted and got the staff to revert a shitty twitter-like update within a day or so, which was nice. I still want wafrn to improve and replace Tumblr so we can escape the PoS CEO, but alas.
I just can’t read it as anything other than warfarin- how’s it supposed to be pronounced?
I say it like waffle + urn (or fern) = wahfern
I just know it's supoosed to be an acronym for "We Allow Female Representing Nipples" as a joking response to Tumblr's porn ban, which removed posts with "Female Representing Nipples"
Take mine too. It's really funny how tumblr banned porn so all the gooners went to twitter and now tumblr is kinda healthy with a really vocal userbase that WILL backlash at any attempt on enshittifying the platform
The biggest con with tumblr is the CEO, but he's too busy making everyone distrust Wordpress.
The ban of every website's existence.
Pretty sure it dates back to the dawn of commerce.
Indeed, when I read this parent comment I had in mind a snake oil salesman in Lucky Luke (Doc Doxey's Elixir, volume 38)
The dead internet isn't a theory on Reddit. It's a reality there. Almost all traffic is
I read somewhere that it's estimated that reddit is 90% bots in the comments, and we already know 99% of front page context is from bots accounts.
Exactly this. The bots are coming from inside the house.
I think it more means "we want to sell your face data"
That's not the point of this.
The point of this is to remove unpaid/unauthorized bots. They want their engagement figures to look even better, and they don't want people offering up their ~~advertisements~~ propaganda without paying up.
Their goal will never be to eliminate bots because undoubtedly that is something they want to sell access to and use themselves.
By guaranteeing that certain posts are bona fide humans, their data is more valuable to sell for AI data as well... and they probably have a way to dox users with this too.
If not already, I assume they’ll offer a for-fee API for bots.
JUST IN: Reddit CEO says company is considering requiring all bots on the platform to click on ads in order to drive revenue to Reddit.
I mean it's also trivially easy for ai to make a photorealistic image of a human, i dont see how this could possibly ever work. Whatever test they apply would be by definition cheatable by AI.