Is Kevin Rose known to know how to address bot problems? I think it's a little absurd to address a bot problem with bringing back the original founder. I believe he was great at community building and functionality, but bot prevention is a different beast. The post mentioned that they also worked with third parties which I believe should have more bot prevention experience than Kevin.

To be fair, I don't know Kevin Rose personally, so maybe he knows more than the industry, but I highly doubt it.

Reddit has the same problem. They are fighting it more or less successfully. I would look more in that direction.

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gagik_co 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Is Reddit fighting the bot problem? They introduced a feature to hide post history which makes it hard to know whether you’re interacting with a spammy bot account. If anything they’re embracing it.

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JimDabell 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Actions speak louder than words. They’ve added features that help spammers hide their behaviour, they are rejecting API keys when people apply for access to deal with the bot problem, they ignore subreddits with spam-friendly moderators, and they ignore reports on vote manipulation. There’s a tonne of low-hanging fruit for tackling the bot problem on Reddit that they aren’t doing anything about, and often it seems like people outside of Reddit do a better job without access to the raw data than people inside Reddit do with the raw data.

I know they claim to care about the bot problem, but they appear at absolute best incredibly complacent about it, if not complicit. All those OnlyFans spammers, AI spam bots, etc. are engagement. They are ruining the platform for people, but engagement figures don’t distinguish between fake engagement and real people. The outcome of their current behaviour is for engagement to steadily rise while the value to real people steadily falls. It’s like they want to be the poster child for Dead Internet Theory.

	▲	gzread 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I wonder what they say if you apply for API access and say you want to run a spam bot.

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hazelnut 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The Reddit CEO mentioned that the community thrives when humans talk to humans - and not with AI slop. He also said they are working on efforts to identify automated accounts.

https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-platform-most-hum...

	▲	blitzar 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The used car salesman mentioned that the car was in perfect working condition.
	▲	trevwilson 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Reddit can't even manage to regularly identify and ban bots that copy previously popular posts/comments verbatim, and that's a much easier problem than modern LLM-based bots.
	▲	isbvhodnvemrwvn 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Actions speak more than words, especially true for CEOs.