bots on websites, on apps on forums, has anyone found a real solution to getting rid of bots? and bot accounts? if so id love to know any solutions
Yes, on my imaginary forum you have to submit your new account application in the form of a handwritten note - on carbon paper, so I can tell that an actual pen or pencil pressed against the page - along with a $10 processing fee that goes directly to my beer fund. People who don’t know what carbon paper is are automatically excluded from my forum.
Once approved, all posts need to be submitted in a similar manner, along with a transcription fee of $15 to compensate for me having to read (a) your god-awful handwriting , and (b) your god-awful post.
I aim to have all posts and comments processed within 20 business days. To this date I have always comfortably beaten that metric, seeing that nobody has posted anything yet.
no
Bots don’t just program themselves (… yet?), someone places them here, with intentionality.
Liars and thieves and trolls have existed since the dawn of time (the ideas of antagonism and predatory behaviors have surely even predated cellular lifeforms).
Conversely, a bot that is properly labeled as such can be quite welcome to perform its specific tasks? Someone built it for a reason after all.
PieFed offers quite a number of tools to help detect and label bots when the OP fails to do so. Most are in the mod tools rather than for an individual end-user. In such cases though, it is impossible to tell whether someone simply ran a post through an LLM for refinement or whether the latter wrote the whole damn thing.
TLDR: “bots” are (ostensibly) fine, it’s people who suck - particularly liars and non-empathetic ones who feel that their right to speak (or vote or whatever) should trump yours, and use such deceptive practices to try to overwhelm others.
- anonymous
- available to everyone
- free of (unwanted) bots
Pick two.
Arguably you could use some digital ID like the EU, that identifies you as a human but not which human, using fancy cryptography. With worldwide rollout this would give you all 3
The solution is delete your account and never use the platform again.
Report and block.
Meeting people IRL to talk about stuff is basically the only real solution.
Outside of that, you’d need to be the admin of your own forum where you manually give out credentials to people you trust to have them. Even then, someone might be a lair and spam anyway, or their account might get hacked, or there’s a backdoor, or something else.
