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.
forcing AI providers to watermark AI generated text would be quite effective
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.
How about Anubis? Is It still working?
- 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?
That’s probably why the EU is doing the remote attestation thing. You can have software freedom but with bots or you can have no bots but with software bondage.
The government would keep track of whether or not they issued you an ID, so that you can’t acquire multiple. You’ll probably be responsible for not losing it, or maybe there’s ways to revoke lost ones without compromising the privacy of it.
As for humans passing their token to a bot, that’s not really solvable by any system. There is always a possibility that a human is just talking to a bot and then typing out the post themselves. But the human is still the one with the authority, and chooses to delegate to the bot.
As for humans passing their token to a bot, that’s not really solvable by any system.
Indeed. Which is (part of) why I wrote, “pick two”.
But the human is still the one with the authority, and chooses to delegate to the bot.
Which is what we already have today.
Your original “pick two” comment implies that you can pick “anonymous” + “free of bots”, or “available to everybody” + “free of bots”. I can’t think of any system that would satisfy those.
Which is what we already have today.
What we have today is only “available to everybody”. The token/ID system adds anonymity
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
This doesn’t disprove what I wrote, as it’s not anonymous.
you can provide pseudoanonymity,
Pseudoanonymity is not anonymity, regardless of how any given person chooses to define that nebulous term.
My “pick two” stands.
but your identity is tied to it for the duration
Then it’s not anonymous.
Hence the pseudoanonymity.
no
Report and block.
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.
