I admit I’ve been guilty of this in the past, so sarcasm aside I cannot recommend this as a strategy for detecting actual bots … even though if you’re parroting the opinion those who have power & control bots wish you to believe, expressing that opinion makes one’s post functionally equivalent to that of a bot. I KNOW, SUE ME 🤷♂️
Does anyone here have wage increase of all the “big responsability” jobs since wikipedia creation ? Jobs like ceo or technical directors, any types of directors
As others said you can’t prevent them completely. Only partially. You do it four steps:
Make it unattractive for bots.
Prevent them from joining.
Prevent them from posting/commenting.
Detect them and kick them out.
The sad part is that, if you go too hard with bot eradication, it’ll eventually inconvenience real people too. (Cue to Captcha. That shit is great against bots, but it’s cancer if you’re a human.) Or it’ll be laborious/expensive and not scale well. (Cue to “why do you want to join our instance?”).
Actual human content will never be undesirable for bots who must vacuum up content to produce profit. It’ll always be attractive to come here. The rest sound legit strategies though
You’re right that it won’t be completely undesirable for bots, ever. However, you can make it less desirable, to the point that the botters say “meh, who cares? That other site is better to bot”.
I’ll give you an example. Suppose the following two social platforms:
Orange Alien: large userbase, overexcited about consumption, people get banned for mocking brands, the typical user is as tech-illiterate enough to confuse your bot with a human.
White Rat: Small userbase, full of communists, even the non-communists tend to outright mock consumption, the typical user is extremely tech-savvy so they spot and report your bot all the time.
If you’re a botter advertising some junk, you’ll probably want to bot in both platforms, but that is not always viable - coding the framework for the bots takes time, you don’t have infinite bandwidth and processing power, etc. So you’re likely going to prioritise Orange Alien, you’ll only bot White Rat if you can spare it some effort+resources.
The main issue with point #1 is that there’s only so much room to make the environment unattractive to bots before doing it for humans too. Like, you don’t want to shrink your userbase on purpose, right? You can still do things like promoting people to hold a more critical view, teaching them how to detect bots, asking them to report them (that also helps with #4), but it only goes so far.
This is the sort of thoughtful reasoning that I’m glad to see here, so a wall of text was warranted! Thanks for taking the time to add to the discussion 👍🙏
Bots can view content without being able to post, which is what people are aiming to cut down. I don’t super care if bots are vacuuming up my shitposts (even my shit posts), but I don’t particularly want to be in a community that’s overrun with bots posting.
Yeah, after all, we post on the internet for it to be visible by everyone, and that includes bots. If we didn’t want bots to find our content, then other humans couldn’t find them either; that’s my stance on this.
I work as an AI engineer, let me tell you, the tech is awesome and has a looooot of potential but its not ready yet. Because of high potential literally no one wants to miss the opportunity of getting rich quick with it. Its only been like 2-3 years when this tech was released to the public, if only openai had released it as open-source, just like everyone before them, we wouldn’t be here. But they wanted to make money and now everyone else wants to too.
Make bot accounts a separate type of account so legitimate bots don’t appear as users. These can’t vote, are filtered out of post counts and users can be presented with more filtering option for them. Bot accounts are clearly marked.
Heavily rate limit any API that enables posting to a normal user account.
Make having a bot on a human user account bannable offence and enforce it strongly.
kbin.life
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