Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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Reading through, it makes sense unlike Twitter's policy change. Why should tech giants have access to Reddit's API on Reddit's dime at no benefit to Reddit or Reddit's users? As long as users are able to keep running bots and alternative apps, I don't see a problem. I just hope that they would allow free academic licenses.
The thing is whether privacy oriented frontends will be requested to pay or not. Cause one of the ways to detect whether one is a regular user, or something else, might be user accesses or requests. A frontend instance is in fact a 3rd party, and most probably will be detected as such, therefore privacy oriented frontends will vanish, as the ones for twitter did, right?
I am not certain about this but belived libreddit and tedit work by scraping the website instead of using the user api. Just like Nitter, Invidious, etc. so I'd guess they stay unaffected.
What's up with this comment? It's not deleted or removed, but it has no content.
I'm wondering if they posted an invisible character just to fool us.
Test
Reddit could add anti-bot restrictions, but they don't, because bots drive up their "engagement" numbers. This is entirely two-faced. They essentially just want to make some money off of something they already see as benefitting them.
I was thinking specifically of bots that are associated with a community, like moderation aids or Wheel of Time's Lews Therin quote bot. I'm not sure the bots you're thinking of actually do increase engagement numbers if they can be detected. Advertisers are only interested in human eyeballs.
Very true, but this reveals the conflicts of interest between these social media companies, and the advertisers they sell space to. They want to say to advertisers: buy an ad on our site, it will reach thousands of real people! See all this activity! When in reality a lot of that activity is bot generated.
Both advertisers and users want to reach and talk to real people, but it's in these social media companies interest to inflate their numbers and fake engagement any way they can.
This isn't a small problem either, I've heard it said that half of all tweets, and a good percentage of youtube comments are from bots.
It's even a reason for those companies not to sell "no advertisement" subscriptions to their users. Reddit could offer something like that, but it would mean to lose the most valuable eyeballs (which belong to the humans who can afford to pay for not seeing ads) when it comes to marketing the website to advertisers.