got the notification to verify my age when trying to access NSFW posts or profiles already for a few weeks now, but as of today my whole account is blocked unless I verify. I guess that’s it then. Based in Austria btw, so there is no specific law in place that forces Reddit to implement this and I will definetly not give my personal information to Persona, a company that belongs to Peter Thiels Palantir group.
I didn’t think there was anyone left on Reddit but bots
There’s real people on there but they’re extremely difficult to differentiate between the bots. Everybody on there sounds the same.
I assume they only require people to verify, and they let the bots roam freely without any supervision or am I wrong and it will remove bots from Reddit?
no you’re correct. reddit corp does NOT want to do anything about its bot infestation. even the apipocalypse carved out exceptions for the botnets that make their entire platform function.
bot content spew keeps doomscrollers doomscrolling and pumps up the metrics that they’re intentionally manipulating to appear like organic traffic. having their cake and eating it too, even to the very end of everything the platform used to stand for
I’m convinced this is true. Ever since the big redesign in 2018 (holy shit was it really eight years ago?) that kind of homogenized the whole platform, it became clear that the people reddit was trying to attract was not the communities but the mindless scrollers.
But the paradox was that some person had to want to post the content and make it feel alive, but that person is not needed anymore.
Facebook is entirely slop, scams, and bottom of the barrel memes but they make billions from attracting the dumbest users who will click on ads and that’s where reddit wants to be.
same reason mr musk cried about bots on twitter constantly and promised to wipe them out only to make it more artificial and manipulated than it ever has been (i’m told)
I was being snarky. I have no idea how the bot accounts on Reddit are organized or managed, I’m just some dude.
I was being snarky as well, and not towards you.
In some circumstances I would actually stand behind user verification on Reddit/Reddit-like forum.
If that meant:
no bots, if you can really be sure that a user is a real person,
real freedom of speech, with real consequences for real people that abuse it (perma ban doesn’t mean much if you can just create a new account).
no flood of low quality AI content.
elimination of troll farms and institutional propaganda accounts…
But knowing current corporations, I am sure, the control applies only to us insignificant people, organized farms will keep on flooding, maybe some of them will have to pay to Reddit (those who didn’t already).
I don’t really have that much of a problem with the age verification as it is - my problem is that the only means to do so is giving my personal information to Persona, a very shady company with a not so good data protection record (they are part of Peter Thiels Palantir group, I guess that says it all).