alt Hacker NewsWhat about charging $1 or $5 for an account? Seems like you could stem the tide pretty easily with something like that.
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presumably most people running these bots are doing it for some financial gain. as long gain > cost the issue won't go away.
It'll stop the ones doing it for the lols, but I imagine they're a minority anyway.
If you head to Twitter right now, the vast majority of bots are blue checks. It seems to actually encourage the opposite, where you trusting that someone paying $8 for an account makes you even more likely to fall for slop
This does not work, for similar reasons why captchas piss off real humans.
You add a barrier here. You think that your solution means that AI is reduced, but you also reduce real humans. I noticed this with other parts too, such as "you need to verify your identity before you can post to the ruby issue tracker". I can do so, but I need my tablet and this takes me more time than before, so I stopped using the ruby issue tracker altogether. (It's not the only reason, but adding barriers really makes me invest my time elsewhere - more likely to do so at the least.)
You always need to consider all trade-offs. Charging money means you will also offset real humans at the same time. And it's not solely about the cost; it is simply a hassle to want to do so. For similar reasons I also rarely register at a phpbb forum - I need to store the password to not forget it etc... so more hassle. Using a password manager is also more of a hassle.
A lot of the "add a cost to stop bad actors" end up being a selection effect in favor of bad actors.
Sure, it might stop 10% of the bad actors and lower the numbers, but it'll stop 80% of the good users who aren't experts at getting around the cost or don't have an income from using the service to just pay it as a cost of business.
Or applying for an account could involve sending a handwritten letter by post.