Half baked thought; what about a linkedin style connection graph where your feed is only populated by those in your network, and it is trivial to see and disconnect from whoever introduced the bot into your network. Would a community self regulate if bots became actually contagious

Make 'em pay for a user account, even a one-off $5 per account should suffice

What stops political campaign money from funding accounts and bots?

$5 is enough for a human to glance at the feed and mute it if it seems bad. The trouble with $0 is you can create a million bots and no one has time to look at them.

I wouldn't mind something like that. When I joined Whatsapp it cost $1 for life and I thought that was a good system. Sadly it's gone, replaced by free but ad funded.

The bots pay monthly for a blue checkmark so that they're promoted to the top of the replies. A small cost does not appear to have been a meaningful disincentive, especially when scammers can easily make that money back and political operatives can easily bankroll that.

Ah, well… y’see that’s where heavy moderation and bans would come in to play, and uhhh…

Facebook has much less bots/porn. They employ huge numbers of humans to achieve that. Also a real name policy.