this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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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:
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.
[Sorry for the wall of text.]
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 👍🙏