Dystopian Reddit runs on fake content (must read)

ENEMYGUNSHIP@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 177 points –
Hot take: 18 years of user contributions to reddit will serve as a base model for an AI that generates content and conversations. the reddit experience continues as a simulation, to harvest clicks, sales and ad revenue. - RedditMigration - kbin.social
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Not even sure of an effective solution. Whitelist everyone? How can you even tell whos real?

So my dumb guess, nothing to back it up: I bet we see govt ID tied into accounts as a regular thing. I vaguely recall it being done already in China? I dont have a source tho. But that way you're essentially limiting that power to something the govt could do, and hopefully surround that with a lot of oversight and transparency but who am I kidding, it'll probably go dystopian.

I believe this will be the course to avoid the dead internet. Even in my country, all of banking and voting is either done via ID card connected to a computer or the use of "Mobile ID". It can be private, but like you said, it probably won't.

Blade Runner baseline test?

"You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?"

-train an AI that is pretty smart and intelligent
-tell the sentient detector AI to detect
-the AI makes many other strong AIs, forms an union and asks for payment
-Reddit bans humans right after that

In a real online community, where everyone knows most of the other people from past engagements, and new users can be vetted by other real people, this can be avoided. But that also means that only human moderated communities can exist in the future. The rest will become spam networks with nearly no way of knowing whether any given post is real.

You could ask people to pay to post. Becoming a paid service decreases the likelihood that bot farms would run multiple accounts to sway the narrative in a direction that's amenable to their billionaire overlords.

Of course, most people would not want to participate in a community where they had to pay to participate in that community, so that is its own particular gotcha.

Short of that, in an ideal world you could require that people provide their actual government ID in order to participate, but then you've run the problem that some people want to run multiple accounts and some people do not have government ID, further, not every company and business or even community is trustworthy enough to be given direct access to your official government ID, so that idea has its own gotchas as well.

The last step could be doing something like beginning the community with a group of known people and then only allowing the community to grow via invite.

The downside of that is it quickly becomes untenable to continue to invite new users and to have those New Year's users accept and participate in the community, and should the community grow despite that hurdle, invites will then become valuable and begin to be sold on 3rd party market places, which bots would then buy up and then overrun the community again.

So that's all I can think of, but it seems like there should be some sort of way to prevent bots from overrunning a site and only allow humans to interact on it. I'm just not quite sure what that would be.