• Bizarroland
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    fedilink
    31 year ago

    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.