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
Yes, on my imaginary forum you have to submit your new account application in the form of a handwritten note - on carbon paper, so I can tell that an actual pen or pencil pressed against the page - along with a $10 processing fee that goes directly to my beer fund. People who don’t know what carbon paper is are automatically excluded from my forum.
Once approved, all posts need to be submitted in a similar manner, along with a transcription fee of $15 to compensate for me having to read (a) your god-awful handwriting , and (b) your god-awful post.
I aim to have all posts and comments processed within 20 business days. To this date I have always comfortably beaten that metric, seeing that nobody has posted anything yet.
How do you know that you know what carbon paper is? What if it’s not about writing it down, but the carbon(friends) we made along the way? And given that we’re all made of carbon, does that make you antifriend? And you know who wasn’t very friendly? Nazis. So you’re basically a Nazi if you think you shouldn’t admit people who don’t knownwhat carbon paper is.
Checkmate, lib
Your Honor, I move to dismiss this entire course of reasoning presented by the prosecution, by the simple fact that it was NOT, presented to me carbon copied in duplicate for review, and as per the terms and conditions of my fictitious forum, all submissions must be expressly submitted via such means, and I shall quote DIRECTLY here, under section 37B of the contract signed by him, it states quite clearly that “all offers shall become null and void if” - and you can read it for yourself in this photostatic copy - “I, the undersigned, shall forfeit all rights, privileges, and licenses herein and herein contained,” et cetera, et cetera… “Fax mentis, incendium gloria cultum,” et cetera, et cetera… “Memo bis punitor delicatum”!
It’s all there! Black and white, clear as crystal! YOU stole Fizzy-Lifting Drinks! YOU bumped into the ceiling, which now has to be washed and sterilized, so you GET… NOTHING! YOU LOSE! GOOD DAY, SIR!
…sir? Have you even checked my gender privilege card yet? It clearly says FEMBOY
I miss Gene Wilder.
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.
- 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
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.
The former can be had on a system accessible only by a restricted group of people, through terminals that have no automation interfaces. Think of a local private library with a bulletin board: Only members can enter, and once inside, anyone can post using the provided tools, but there are no tools that bots could use, and there’s nothing connecting an individual to what they post on the board. Of course, a system like this would not be available to everyone; it wouldn’t work as an internet service, for example.
The latter can be had by requiring an access token issued to each user. Bots could then be either ejected quickly by revoking their owner’s token when discovered, or prevented early by requiring all access to be through public terminals that have no automation interfaces. Of course, any system that issues an access token to an individual cannot be anonymous if revocation is to be meaningful.
The government would keep track of whether or not they issued you an ID,
The token/ID system adds anonymityI wish that were possible, but no, it is not. If a government (or any other authority) keeps track of whether they issue someone an ID, then they must also have the ability to connect IDs to individuals. Such an arrangement can only be anonymous if everyone involved is a good-faith actor choosing not to abuse that ability, which history demonstrates is not a realistic assumption.
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.
How about Anubis? Is It still working?
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
Report and block.
no
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.
