zlacker

>>djtrip+(OP)
The fact that soon the internet will be so flooded with bots that you'll be floating eternally alone in a sea of imposters unless we create some draconian real person ID system is a tragedy so great it's crazy it has not dawned on people yet.

I started out loving the net because of the feelings of connection and partly because of the honesty and discussions stemming from at least pseudo anonymity, both silly stuff and egghead discussions on history and tech - but i always felt a "human presence" and community out there behind the screens.

Now anonymity is dying and the value of discussions will plummet because you'll be just be arguing, learning or getting inspired from a selection of corporate PR bots, state sponsored psyopping or "idiot with an assistant" that will try to twist your mind or steal your time 24/7.

Christ this is going to be so incredibly boring, paranoid and lonely for everyone in a few years time!

I'm honestly having an existential crisis, the internets is already filled with too much noise and people are already lonely enough.

Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted..

>>kossTK+H6
This has a far easier and less dystopian solution: charge money to access communities, which are smaller and more focused. I find it very unlikely that corporate PR bots will be paying $5 a month each to spam Substack communities, for example.

>>keifer+8j
It's doesn't even have to be $5/month. Make a $10 deposit required for creating an account, and for each offense against the guidelines, you get a "fine" that proportional for the severity of the infraction (uncivil discussion? $0.10 cents, participating in hell-threads? $0.50. Comparing HN with reddit? $1.337 Obvious spam? Your whole $10 is gone.) Repeat offenses get exponentially more expensive, and you only get to post with a positive balance.

>>rglull+Dl1
On the surface I like this idea, but this makes it harder for participants from poorer countries from, well, participating. For some countries this is more than a week of the average wage!

>>joeldo+nq1
It's difficult to balance; unfortunately from experience in moderating, the poorer countries with a large anglo internet presence also tend to be the biggest sources of spam (not so much low-effort trolling, Americans do that wayyy more).

You could to some extent make an argument that gatekeeping poorer economies is one way to prevent those bots from signing up. It's not one I necessarily agree with, but it is one way to mitigate the spam.

My solution would probably be to permit users from poorer countries to request a signup from someone else at a discount appropriate to their economy using an invite chain. That way you can still offer a fair way for users from poor economies to engage, whilst allowing for easy banning of spambots simply by treebanning the original inviter if you get the spam issue.