Yeah, sadly I have to agree, a fee won’t do anything on its own. This would require a mix of features working together. Each makes botting a bit more painful and a bit less effective, but putting them all together makes it not worthwhile.

Also, we don’t need to make a space perfect, just better than other places. You don’t need to be faster than the bear to escape, just faster than the slowest member of your group.

Ooh, I really like that idea! You are putting money in as a sort of deposit, but after a period of time it has served its purpose and the money can be returned. If I have to be active for say 3 months and also a certain amount of activity to get my deposit returned then burning the account after would be a pain in the arse and I would not bother. Having an account in good standing could also be a soft filter. Users could only show content from validated users and thus filter out all the bot junk, but if they wanted their comments and posts to show up they would go through the process.

I hate to use the example, but one of the worst places on the internet actually found a solution for this a long time ago. $10. By having a small, but meaningful, fee for the account people couldn’t have unlimited accounts and there was a cost to getting banned. If you are posting bot slop you will be banned quickly and lose your $10. If you are not being bot like and also not breaking tonnes of other rules many times then you will not be banned and can keep your account.

This works well enough most of the time. Getting a new account after your previous one has been banned can be done fairly quickly but that $10 adds up quickly and can fund the cost of reviewing and potentially banning bad actors. It doesn’t solve the problem in full, but another thing you can add is region gating. In your profile you set where you are going to be dialling in from, including which VPN providers and so on. This means you have a fairly specific pattern of behaviour that is white listed in advance. Now if your account is compromised and starts logging in from other places it can be blocked quickly, and also potentially the login attempts can be blocked and a password reset process initiated.

Another option would be to require a invite only process and have those you invite reflect on you. For example, if someone invites a friend and that friend invites not accounts then both people are impacted. If someone invites 9 good people and 1 abused account their ratio is 0.9, if they drop below some value then they lose invite privileges. If you consistently invite crappy people or abusive bots you get banned, but if it happens only occasionally then you lose your invite rights for a while. Those parameters are all tunable but should help to get things operating more smoothly.

Also, having invite periods but closing invites most of the time can also kill off many bots. People using bots are lazy, they don’t want to wait for months posting stuff and pretending to be a person to then use the accounts to post 3 junk things and then have the whole set banned. They want a large network of accounts they can throw away as needed. Make it slow, expensive, and consequential. Make botting 50 accounts cost $500 and also be a waste of time and the bots will stop coming.