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
The oldest redditors got shadow banned because their posts were too valuable to the IPO to show up as blocked or deleted user (the story varries, but my friend ended up getting banned for joking about putting a lock on one of those uhauls full of proud boys (back when they were renting uhauls before Uhaul said they couldn’t anymore)
Those of us here originally, are the ones who deleted their accounts, contrary to what reddit believed would happen.
I know at least one of you will read this, and I am here to receive a powerful high five.
I know two people still using it. Thing is, quite a lot of gaming communities are pretty much dead here, while there are still enough flesh and bone users on reddit (plus eight times as many bots, but there will always be someone to respond within a day if you have a question).
Of course it’s not like there are only these two options and nothing else, but where would you go to for decently paced discussion? Honest question: I had left reddit a long time ago, but I won’t find pre-existing answers on Lemmy for a good number of games, and most of the communities here seem to be bone dry.
nsfw especially on reddit filled with bots more than other subs.
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
thier purges last year did a huge number on thier engagement thought, they overcompensated, and then open-ai and google stopped scraping so now they are tyring to force logins so people can be datamined again.
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.
2018 is when propagana bots/troll farms started to appear , and thats when they started banning significantly even for the slightest misunderstanding, it obviously got worst overtime.
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.
the individual users who spam, would have a bunch of device they operate with multiple(dozens) of accounts each using services to host multiple browser instances at once, to seperate accounts from each other, so they dont get immediately connected by reddits filters. also multiple IP from different sources at once, and yes they spend money to do this, and this seperate the propaganda bots/spammers you hear done by countries.
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).
There’s real people on there but they’re extremely difficult to differentiate between the bots. Everybody on there sounds the same.