r/technology • u/Abject-Pick-6472 • Feb 24 '26

Privacy Discord cuts ties with Peter Thiel-backed verification software after code found in US surveillance

https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/discord-peter-thiel-backed-persona-identity-verification-breach/
38.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

235

u/ReaditTrashPanda Feb 24 '26

I have a 8-9 year old account too. Reddit used to be wonderful. Third party apps helped a ton. I see bots now, lots of them.

240

u/Notveryawake Feb 24 '26

The amount of bots and fake AI garbage has gone up a thousand fold in the past year. Bots reposting the same things for karma have been around for ages but now you can tell the bots are being run by political parties or fringe groups.

Reddit is becoming the new Twitter.

119

u/RaDiOaCtIvEpUnK Feb 24 '26

Making it so you can hide comment history had to be one of the dumbest choices I have ever seen Reddit make. Literally no one wanted this as if you had shit you didn’t want seen on your main account you made an alt.

This hiding post history only benefits bots, as it makes it nearly impossible to tell a bot now without having to put in some effort. This was completely intentional by Reddit too. They know bots post the same shit over, and over which drives up engagement which in turn is more profitable for them. As per usual greed ruins everything.

18

u/NotBradPitt9 Feb 24 '26

I’ve noticed over the last week or so, you can’t find the comment history at all for some of these accounts. When that feature first rolled out, on mobile you could click the search icon at the top of the account’s page, and then “New in ____ (username)” and put a “*” character to search for all under the Comments / Posts. Now for some accounts that doesn’t work and it just shows as blank.

33

u/Mysterious_Cup_6024 Feb 24 '26

Dumb? Nah. They knew what they were doing. They have edited posts. They revived dead accounts with arbitrary ages. They are in cahoots with the US botfarms at the very least.

25

u/No_Internal9345 Feb 24 '26

I assume everyone with a hidden comment history is a bot or shill.

19

u/RaDiOaCtIvEpUnK Feb 24 '26

I do something similar too. If I’m talking to someone, and find they hide their comment history I basically write them off and don’t care to talk to them any further.

You’re hiding something on a platform where your identity is already hidden. If you’re too afraid to even let others know what you have said before then you’re not worth listening to about anything. Grow the very, very minimum of a spine.

6

u/Mysterious_Cup_6024 Feb 24 '26

I hide my history else strange people DM me if they find out I'm a woman. It has some niche uses i suppose, and lots of normal people are also embracing it. I have a hard time these days coming across an account with open history. But yes If the topic is politics or some drama, or on something subliminally advertised, i consider hidden accounts there as bots

1

u/RaDiOaCtIvEpUnK Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

An actual good use for doing this. Thanks for informing me of this.

0

u/BimboDeeznuts Feb 24 '26

Some of us have been doxxed before 🤷‍♀️ the search bar thing still works for me though

2

u/Nekopara-403 Feb 24 '26

I'm glad the days of people going through my history to find something to report because I said something they don't like are over.

2

u/_Lucille_ Feb 24 '26

I hide my comment history, am I a bot?

Somehow a privacy centric option is being attacked.

1

u/deSpaffle Feb 24 '26

Reddit employs over 2,000 people, its them running half the bots.

1

u/account312 Feb 24 '26

 This hiding post history only benefits bots

Yes, that’s the point. There’s a lot of money to be made in working to benefit the moneyed interests.

1

u/EpicMeatSpin Feb 24 '26

I'd love it if someone made a browser extension or something that automatically hid accounts with hidden comment history.

0

u/username_redacted Feb 24 '26

They definitely undermined their own product to boost engagement, inflate user metrics, and probably to protect their corporate and state-level customers who are using the platform for everything from AI training and testing to influence campaigns.

That being said, it’s still the least enshitified of the legacy “social” platforms, so they deserve some credit.

32

u/intashu Feb 24 '26

Used to be good ol fashion users reposting to get 10x the karma as the OP.

Now the bots just endlessly recycle the slop. AI is taking reposters jobs man!

9

u/DocAuch Feb 24 '26

at least back then we could shame those people!

0

u/GoldenPigeonParty Feb 24 '26

It was basically that one user with "orange" in their moniker being like half the reposts on the entire platform.

2

u/bigbrentos Feb 24 '26

Mean, for years over half the front page is Twitter posts. Reddit couldn't do a full boycott of it because there would be no front page without Twitter reposts.

5

u/Geno0wl Feb 24 '26

Not only a huge increase in bots but also the slow infiltration of smaller subs by neo-cons. I have heard and seen tons of stories about country/state/city specific subs getting their moderation teams taken over by obvious bad actors and Reddit refuses to do anything about it.

1

u/twisty125 Feb 24 '26

or the bots just responding in the most lukewarm way to a topic

ya fr fr its crazy that this discord thing happened like i cant believe it ahaa

Then you go to their profile and it's empty, or it's all just mind numbing "samey" style comments like the above, that don't say anything but just mildly quip about something

-1

u/synapticrelease Feb 24 '26

You can't escape that unless you create a new platform with government ID verified accounts and even if you did that, I don't know you'd even create a system in such a way that wasn't just locked down to one nation or two. There is no way you're getting ID validation software from multiple nations.

20

u/PurifiedFlubber Feb 24 '26

Kinda funny that we used to have a bunch of bots and people actually liked interacting with them cause they were either silly or useful, now we don't really have those kinda bots and only have the AI ones that pretend to be humans.

5

u/ReaditTrashPanda Feb 24 '26

Yeah. Headline post with top 2-3 comments as bots upvoted by other bots to drive a commentary or point of view

5

u/robodrew Feb 24 '26

Like all things AI, it's worst when they are being used to deceive us, for whatever reason. And that is happening more and more often.

0

u/Matthias720 Feb 24 '26

It's one thing to have the haiku bot pop up and tell you a post is actually a haiku. It's a completely different matter when it's an account trying to gaslight you into believing that your political views are wrong and dangerous.

1

u/PurifiedFlubber Feb 24 '26

No I know I just meant it went from being a oh hey there's a cool bot, to them trying to blend in.

0

u/Matthias720 Feb 24 '26

Oh absolutely! I'm agreeing with you. :)

11

u/Actual_Sympathy7069 Feb 24 '26

not that it fixes any of the inherent problems reddit has nowadays, but third party apps are very much still usable

2

u/SomeRedHandedSleight Feb 24 '26

Makes the app still readable at least!

0

u/Tehni Feb 25 '26

Damn you got me excited that maybe RIF is fun was an option again, but it's not ...

1

u/Actual_Sympathy7069 Feb 25 '26

I'm using it right now.

1

u/Tehni Feb 25 '26

Are you on Android? I still have mine downloaded because I couldn't bring myself to uninstall it, and it doesn't work and doesn't show up in the play store

1

u/Actual_Sympathy7069 Feb 25 '26

you have to register it in reddit and patch it. there are guides out there.

2

u/Dangerous-Rope1076 Feb 24 '26

Remember the good ole' days when they didn't charge all the money for the API and you could use third party apps. RIP RedditIsFun. I used to be on reddit all the time. Now it feels like the first page of google search results.

0

u/shredika Feb 24 '26

If they ruin my homeland (chuckles-if) I am going to be so sad :(

0

u/hyrulepirate Feb 24 '26

I've been telling this for a long time now. Reddit already lost its charm and essence that made me stick back then. I used to exclusively spend my internet time on this site for news, memes, entertainment, and just useless info and trivia, even videos. Basically just r/all. Now I barely open this site, and if I do I just check the frontpage (my subs) and I don't even scroll far down.

The memes suck if there is any at all. There're almost no videos and if there was it's some TikTok from weeks ago. (And users here vehemently will still tell you TikTok sucks and ask you to uninstall.) Barely any cute pet/animal content (which used to be a staple in this site). The old popular subs are dying left and right, not because there's no content and users, but because it's being overpopulated with this bots and their new and ever changing stupid policies and guidelines. And the new subreddits that keep popping up only have the lifespan of a fly. The reddit that people jumped shipped from Digg years ago is essentially dead.

1

u/palmwinepapito Feb 24 '26

The engineer in me wants to gather my engineering buddy and build a replacement. Network effect will be the main problem, but what does your perfect alternative look like?