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."
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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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.
OG “fake it till you make it” business.
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.
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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.
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welcome, reddit refugees.
Thank you. This is why I’m here.
Ditto!
Well that and they permabanned my 14 year old, 1million karma account for making a post that insinuated Donald is a pedophile that some MAGA got all upset about and they rejected my appeal.
So....fuck em.
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So the entire point of reddit, the anonymity, is to be thrown out the fucking window lmao
Today everyone throws their principles out the window. Such is the present(
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in order to crack down on ~~AI~~ unprofitable bots
I'm sure they'll have no issues allowing bots that align with their interests
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Requiring face ID AFTER genAI has become great at generating faces is certainly a decision
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I'm a new lemmy user because of this
Welcome! It's WAY quieter over here because it's mostly people, not bots.
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Since when is Polymarket's Twitter account a reliable source of information?
Since when is Polymarket’s Twitter account a reliable source of information?
I can't comment on that specifically, but it was reported by pcmag and others
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So when is this happening, so we can mentally and logistically prepare for the next influx of new users into the fediverse?
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I made the switch to Lemmy today, feels old school kind of good.
Reddit is not only allowing for bots to run rampant, but also it’s managed by the Epstein class and their supporters.
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Im sure the website that sold userdata to every single AI company to train their models on wouldn't ever even think of selling the faces of every one of its users to a company to train its AI face generator on.
Or that the website which accidentally admitted "the most reddit addicted city" is an air force base that hosts their online counterintelligence teams... Where was I going with this? Hmm must be nothing.
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BREAKING NEWS! Reddit figured out how to make their platform even shittier
Lemmyflation is real
Inb4 bots pass this and my face is rejected
It took a lot of customer abuse to break Reddit's stranglehold, but they are perilously close to a Digg like migration off their platform. Spez can take a hike into bankruptcy.
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My laptop’s TPM requires a pint of blood to allow booting to an OS. Two pints if it’s Linux.
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The real problem was third party clients I swear
Watch /r/politics posts go from 22k upvotes to 3k upvotes overnight.
Lemme get this straight
foster a website that encourages engagement instead of real human interaction bots flood the website to farm engagement with months and years-old reposts obliterate your API support, causing an exodus of users that use 3rd party apps slowly hemorrhage users while going IPO with your bot site now mandate id checks so we can weed out the bots that made your IPO look so good
Genius play by Spez. (/s)
I mean, requiring FaceID is a horrible idea, but there maybe might be a better alternative (I'm talking about the general idea of a "proof of humanity" online, not specifically using this solution).
The fact of the matter is that bots are a massive issue online. When russia got sanctioned and cut off from the western Internet, r/Conservative went radio silent for a couple of days - until they figured out how to VPN through the Netherlands. There are whole communities where bots discuss bot-posted content. And I have no doubt in my mind that it will also happen on Lemmy as soon as there's even a hint of profit* to be found.
* "profit" not as in "monetary gain", but as "any kind of gain, be it money, influence, propaganda, chaos", etc., etc.
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They made it easier for bots to thrive by allowing hidden post histories, limiting the API, and punishing users for "bad" reports, but claim they need face ID to filter out bots?
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I don't care, because reddit, but this makes me wonder if you can just have an AI generate a generic face and feed that in.
It's obviously not about bots. Isn't spez friendly with Peter Thiel?
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I'm glad they violated my account for a non violation and denied my appeal in the first week of opening a new account then. They aren't trying to make their moderation believable, I'm persona non grata for whatever reasons, to appease the administration I presume.
Fuck them, glad I stayed off. I kind of need the help on some stuff though, there just aren't enough people or communities on here yet.
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More lowkey polymarket advertisements.
Why is it the only place I see polymarket is on Lemmy screenshots?
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Reddit should crack down on human users instead! Let Reddit be AI Bot Exclusive space!
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Yea I prefer to get my Reddit news from a gambling site that facilitates bets on human lives.
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