Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman's iris-scanning Orb

semafor.com

15 points·0x79de··4 comments

I don't understand this concept of validating real people as it relates to Reddit.

Reddit as a system doesn't seem to care if someone is real, bots, spammers of all kind abound and reporting them to the admins does nothing most of the time. Their volunteer moderators can't handle the influx of AI looking accounts ...

Their ads are designed to look like organic posts and fool you.

It seems like a real disconnect from how Reddit works.

I love the idea of social media that somehow is ONLY real people, but Reddit is the last place I would expect that.

I suspect the advertisers are starting to realize that a non-trivial part of Reddit (and other social media) has become bots talking to bots, ads to ads, and people on their 80th account screwing around. It's also why Reddit has been a pretty lousy "place" for a while now, and getting worse every day.

I doubt this tech will fix it, but I can understand why Reddit is desperate to find a way to ensure that they have a product (people) to sell to customers (advertisers) that has some actual value. Meanwhile from the point of view of the average Redditor I suspect that ID validation is a deal breaker, and the population of real, non-ban-dodging, non-bot Redditors is actually a minority of the site's activity.

Reddit might need to know who real users are, but that doesn't mean they have to truthfully surface that information to us little people.

Now that's very true, but if they have the data and misrepresent it to shareholders or advertisers, that's potentially a massive legal problem for them. If they simply don't have the data to begin with...

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