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
Sure. There isn’t anything watertight… But we have Captchas, human moderators, report buttons… Email tries to tackle it with spamfilters… I suppose forcing AI providers to watermark AI generated text would be quite effective against those kinds of bots… There’s a few ideas out there. Unfortunately there’s also lots of bot activity out there.
How about Anubis? Is It still working?
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
If anonymous and available to everyone, what would prevent people from acquiring an ID and passing it on to a bot, or from acquiring multiples?
Rate-limiting ID acquiring and having them to be short-lived deals with malicious parties. Having for example a token that proofs that you’re a legitimate person for 1 day, but your identity is tied to it for the duration means that you can only abuse the system only so for so long. For longer periods e.g. a month, half a year, you can provide pseudoanonymity, and it poses bigger issues with privacy, but a person who is willing to be subjected to be identified for a certain period of time gains certain privileges.
Sounds very dystopian though, but not having ID won’t stop the tech giants from profiling you anyways.
but your identity is tied to it for the duration
Then it’s not anonymous.
Hence the pseudoanonymity.
no
The solution is delete your account and never use the platform again.
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.
