Reddit's finally going after bots - will it actually change anything? Curious what you think

Posted by lrenv22@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 101 comments

Asking here because I'd genuinely rather hear from real people on this than risk it on half the other subs right now (you'll get the irony in a sec). Huffman basically announced this week that Reddit's going to start asking "fishy" accounts to prove they're human - Face ID, passkeys, iris scanning *potentially*. The goal being that when someone replies to you, you'd actually know there's a person there. And I get it. I hope maximum 15% of posts on here are AI-generated. Fifteen. That's not background noise anymore, it's kind of a problem. I think bots that are hard to spot have been slowly building karma for months, replying contextually, sounding completely normal. Does a face ID check at signup catch those? I'm not convinced. What's interesting is Huffman specifically mentioned world ID (Sam Altman's iris-scanning thing) as the kind of "privacy-first solution" he actually believes in. And - maybe coincidence, maybe not - Orb locations have been quietly appearing across London and other cities for a while now. Hadn't connected the dots until I saw his post and then found out about Orb locations... Would you actually do it? Scan your iris once, prove you're human, get a cleaner Reddit in return? Curious what people here think. And yes, I'm aware of the irony of asking this on a platform that might be crawling with bots - though fair play to the mods here, this sub is kept surprisingly clean. Imagine how much easier your jobs get if this actually works.