Would-be Reddit competitor Digg just shut down because it couldn’t get a handle on the bots overrunning its site. On Wednesday, Reddit said it’s taking on the challenge itself.
The company will begin labeling automated accounts that are providing a service to users, similar to how the “good bots” are labeled on X, and it will now require accounts that are suspected of being bots to verify if they’re human.
Reddit stresses this is not going to be a sitewide verification requirement, and will only occur if something suggests that the account isn’t human, including its activity on the site or other technical markers. If the account can’t pass the test, it may be restricted, Reddit said.
To identify potential bots, Reddit is using specialized tooling that looks at account-level signals and other factors — like how quickly the account is attempting to write or post content. Using AI to write posts or comments, however, is not against its policies (though community moderators may set their own rules).
To verify an account is human, Reddit will leverage third-party tools like passkeys from Apple, Google, YubiKey, and other third-party biometric services, like Face ID or even Sam Altman’s World ID — or, in some countries, the use of government IDs. Reddit notes this last category may be required in some countries like the U.K. and Australia and some U.S. states, because of local regulations on age verification, but it’s not the company’s preferred method.
“If we need to verify an account is human, we’ll do it in a privacy-first way,” Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman wrote in the announcement Wednesday. “Our aim is to confirm there is a person behind the account, not who that person is. The goal is to increase transparency of what is what on Reddit while preserving the anonymity that makes Reddit unique. You shouldn’t have to sacrifice one for the other.”
The changes are meant to address t …