otter , 7 hours ago

1. The platform needs an incentive to get rid of bots.

Bots on Reddit pump out an advertiser friendly firehose of “content” that they can pretend is real to their investors, while keeping people scrolling longer. On Fediverse platforms there isn’t a need for profit or growth. Low quality spam just becomes added server load we need to pay for.

I’ve mentioned it before, but we ban bots very fast here. People report them fast and we remove them fast. Searching the same scam link on Reddit brought up accounts that have been posting the same garbage for months.

Twitter and Reddit benefit from bot activity, and don’t have an incentive to stop it.

2. We need tools to detect the bots so we can remove them.

Public vote counts should help a lot towards catching manipulation on the fediverse. Any action that can affect visibility (upvotes and comments) can be pulled by researchers through federation to study/catch inorganic behavior.

Since the platforms are open source, instances could even set up tools that look for patterns locally, before it gets out.

It’ll be an arm’s race, but it wouldn’t be impossible.