Or applying for an account could involve sending a handwritten letter by post.

Right, because I cannot possibly purchase a thousand such letters for less than the cost of minimum wage for an hour or two.

Where I live a 2nd class stamp costs the equivalent of $1.24. That's $1240 for a thousand.

Not including the cost of the letter itself, or the envelope, or the cost to write it if it's being farmed out to overseas labour, who then has to send it by international postage. And then you have evidence of where the letter originated, and that can be compared with how the user presents themselves online.

Little bit more than 2 hours minimum wage I think.

The kind of place that will make and send letters by the thousand will probably have a better deal on postage.

I'm seeing business rates for stamps is the equivalent of $1.20 per stamp. Free delivery though.

This is fucked and I hate it. Internet is (was?) about convenience and direct access. I understand there are challenges that need solutions, but this ain’t it

> was

Yep. Was.

This isn’t the internet you grow up on. This is an internet scoped for bots and organizations.

> Internet is (was?) about convenience and direct access.

Was.

Maybe you are to young to remember the (pre-spam) days when it was polite to leave your SMTP server open for others to use?

Slop as a letter is a thing already https://www.axidraw.com/

Not that I don't take your point that such a service could exist, but the site you linked explicitly says they don't offer letter writing as a service.

Also, I imagine it's not impossible to reliably distinguish between an autopen and genuine handwriting. The company who's site you linked say their machine can't perform complex pen movements so calligraphy is impossible.

The real advantage of posting a letter is that you have to pay for postage, and the stamps on the envelope will indicate which country the letter is really coming from.

If someone buys or makes something like this just to send a letter, they a) put in more human effort than writing it themselves, and b) are probably interesting and would benefit your community.

I think what robostwantdata was suggesting was that people would supply a "Use my mechanical pen for a fee" type service, where customers send the text they want written and the address they want the letter sent to.

As I've already said in my direct reply, there's still the various costs involved in posting the letter, and if the community is based on a particular geographical area e.g. "Connacht Hill Farmer's Association", then it would raise eyebrows if the envelope had a Kazakhstani stamp on it.

Adding that much friction is also going to loose you many genuine users. Might be worth it depending on the community but if it makes newcomers fewer than your usual churn rate its a death sentence.

I think a better approach would be to upload an image to the sign up form with explicit instructions that isn't in text on the page to be easily read by AI. Like "Answer 2 in the Math captcha" even though the correct answer is 5, the AI will always enter the wrong number.

That would work for a time, like with Captchas. Then the AI would overcome it and you'd have to come up with a new idea.

True. To be fair, this was a reply to a comment about a niche community.

Though it's possible that this approach could become normalised if it's proven to work at a small scale.

We bringing back Something Awful, now?

It never left.

No it's Something IS awful.

Sorry, they did an interview about 20 years back were they kept correcting the host to 'Something is awful' I have just called it that ever since.

Jeffery of YOSPOS bought it before Lowtax overdosed on mangosteen and it’s still operating.

The :10bux: requirement did seem to do a good job of weeding out the lowest-level trash/spammers and encouraged people to toe the (sometimes very blurry) line. I remember how absolutely godawful some of the no-signup-fee SA-offshoots were (remember TheGunOwner's spin-off site "LivingWithStyle"?), to say nothing about 4chan.

If you head to Twitter right now, the vast majority of bots are blue checks. It seems to actually encourage the opposite, where you trusting that someone paying $8 for an account makes you even more likely to fall for slop

I think twitter is an odd-one-out here, twitter as a whole has been heading down hill ever since the acquisition, and I wouldn't be surprised if many of those blue checks are officially sanctioned bots. Especially given the way so many of them push the same narratives that Musk does at the same time he does.

I don't think so.

The people leaving LLM replies are paying minimum $20/month for LLM access, and probably more in practice.

A one time $10 fee is not a deterrent.

I think you're right. I think _merely_ paying won't deter them. But, if you couple this with banning of accounts that post AI slop, you get:

1) the cost becomes even higher for AI slop factories since they will probably get multiple accounts banned.

2) It prevents influence to accrue to any specific account. This diminishes the incentive for slop, since sufficient success means a ban.

3) It reduces the moderation effort since creating accounts is no longer a sustainable strategy.

Agreed, but I left twitter even before the right-hand-raising oligarch took over. The reason was that censorship started to kick in aka twitter staff writing me a mail that my "conduct" is not appropriate. Basically they try to reduce the "aggressiveness" in written content. Well, that's already an assumption on their part; and in any discourse with orthogonal opinions, you can not really reconcile such positions anyway, so I don't need some 20 years old from India hired by Twitter to tell me what I should or should not do (though, realistically it was a bot actually that just scanned for content). I noticed that censorship is increasing on "social" websites. Reddit as an example is a mega-censorship site - the amount of deletion by crazy mods is insane.

Bots are indeed killing twitter now. I noticed more and more were leaving permanently. Musk evidently accelerated the decay here. There is something wrong with his mindset here, it's almost as if it is pathological. His perception of things is genuinely distorted, and I am not even 100% certain he is completely aware of it; he must be partially aware, but it seems there is also something wrong with the brain. No wonder he gets along with Trump - that one now has clearly dementia narcissism in the final stage.

It’s mainly an odd one out because bluechecks have access to monetization and get pushed to the top of replies. It’s basically a wishlist for bad actors.

I'm not convinced that twitter is actually trying to get rid of bots. They're OK with boosters/scammers/propaganda/agitation mills, they just want a cut.

This does not work, for similar reasons why captchas piss off real humans.

You add a barrier here. You think that your solution means that AI is reduced, but you also reduce real humans. I noticed this with other parts too, such as "you need to verify your identity before you can post to the ruby issue tracker". I can do so, but I need my tablet and this takes me more time than before, so I stopped using the ruby issue tracker altogether. (It's not the only reason, but adding barriers really makes me invest my time elsewhere - more likely to do so at the least.)

You always need to consider all trade-offs. Charging money means you will also offset real humans at the same time. And it's not solely about the cost; it is simply a hassle to want to do so. For similar reasons I also rarely register at a phpbb forum - I need to store the password to not forget it etc... so more hassle. Using a password manager is also more of a hassle.

> Charging money means you will also offset real humans at the same time.

On completely different scales. Even if it not perfect, it is strong enough of a filter to turn a bot infestation into a mild annoyance.

That's an assumption. Depending on the incentives in play, the relative scale at which AI users and real humans are affected may well be the opposite of what you expect.

No, that's based on my experience running subscribers-only instances on the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix, Funkwhale) for more than 6 years now. I might not have that many users on the servers, but it's certainly a higher number than the zero spammers I ever got.

Yeah, I tried to sign up for instagram, but at the fourth captcha I gave up and left. How does instagram have any users with such a hostile sign-up barrier?

My profile picture is old enough to open an account on instagram

Fun fact. There is this threads twitter clone from meta. How do I login?

I "log in with Instagram", where "I log in with Facebook". Guess how well data recovery works when there is literally no password set. I'm surprised these systems work at all.

Metafilter and Something Awful both do this.

Both sites have survived and continue to work well for their users.

A small cost does definitely work for some sites.

Is SA still a thing? I had an account since... 2007? God I'm old. I miss the days when you could have a community that you could easily search for content. Nowadays everything is a discord black hole.

I can't access gnu.org, because their extreme measurements against the AI bots blocking my slightly older browser.

presumably most people running these bots are doing it for some financial gain. as long gain > cost the issue won't go away.

It'll stop the ones doing it for the lols, but I imagine they're a minority anyway.

Would be great to have some sort of bot trap that would just drain a dollar here and there from AI slopologists and shadowban their accounts to only interact with other AI accounts.

Or swaying opinions on hot topics. It's interesting to see how much more often politics gets injected into forums (reddit or elsewhere) on completely unrelated topics. Sometimes it's subtle, like a "signature" promoting out of the mainstream causes that then slowly make it look more mainstream.

Almost all geographic subreddits (for cities/states) are overwhelmed by rage baiting posts and comment. This got worse when reddit did the moderation changes a few years ago when they went public. To them it probably just looks like more "engagement". I have no doubt various nation state actors are backing a lot of this.

A lot of the "add a cost to stop bad actors" end up being a selection effect in favor of bad actors.

Sure, it might stop 10% of the bad actors and lower the numbers, but it'll stop 80% of the good users who aren't experts at getting around the cost or don't have an income from using the service to just pay it as a cost of business.

There is still no good way to send or receive such payments that works globally. Let alone one that doesn't mean leaking personal information. This will deter a lot of good users, but not many bad actors, as others have pointed out.