It would seem reasonable for large investors, -those who have influence on a company, to require MAU excluding bots figures as part of their due diligence. On the other hand: FOMO, guess.

The only economic actor directly hurt by bots is the advertiser, right? To some degree, it's against investors' incentives to attempt to strictly exclude bots.

Obviously in the longterm it hurts value, but "doing things that don't scale" creates a lot of degrees of freedom (user growth, cashflow, funding) that you can use to pay off your "tech debt".

Thanks to this thread I now see why the bot problem is sad difficult to solve. It sticks deep. Damn.