Reddit CEO posted this today:

1. Clear labeling for non-human accounts
At the end of last year, we launched verified profiles for brands, publishers, and creators. For professional accounts, being clearly labeled increases transparency and helps their content be accepted in relevant communities.

Next, we’re standardizing how automation shows up on Reddit. Accounts that use automation in allowed ways (what many call “good bots”) will be labeled as [App]. If you see that label, you know you’re interacting with a machine, not a person.

Developers can register their apps to receive this label (there will be more about this in r/redditdev).

2. Continued removal of nefarious bots and spam

We hate it as much as you do and already remove the vast majority of it (an average of 100K accounts per day), often before anyone sees it. We’ll continue to remove nefarious bot content, including spam. 

3. Human verification for automated or otherwise fishy behavior

If something suggests an account isn’t human, including automation (hi, web agents), we may ask it to confirm there’s a person behind it. This will be rare and will not apply to most users. Accounts that can’t pass may be restricted. 

To be clear, this is not sitewide human verification, let alone sitewide ID verification.

4. Reporting suspected automation
Redditors have long been the best bullshit detectors, and increasingly great Turing testers. We’ll make reporting easier and more flexible (these days, we can infer most issues from a report without a lot of context). I’d also like to include comments from other users pointing something out (e.g., “nice post, bot, now fuck off”), since that’s most users’ preferred reporting method.

SN has quite a few clankers that show up trying to collect sats, and I'm sure the probably is a lot worse on Reddit. Nevertheless, my knee-jerk reaction here is that this is bad and a slow move towards IDing everyone who uses Reddit.

Because the devil is in the details of number 3. If they do it too lightly, nothing changes and the site is full of bots. If they do it too hard, they start "proof-of-human"ing everybody.

When X started rolling out it's age-estimation stuff, my account (not blue checked) was heavily restricted at first. I couldn't hardly use the app because every other post was "This content is restricted in your area until we verify your age" or something like that. Eventually it got better, but still some posts are hidden.

While I don't like the proof of human stuff, I do wonder what we can do? Pay to post and downzapping are good reducers for bots, but clearly they aren't enough to prevent it completely. Thoughts?