most of the time you’ll be talking to a bot there without even realizing. they’re gonna feed you products and ads interwoven into conversations, and the AI can be controlled so its output reflects corporate interests. advertisers are gonna be able to buy access and run campaigns. based on their input, the AI can generate thousands of comments and posts, all to support your corporate agenda.
for example you can set it to hate a public figure and force negative commentary into conversations all over the site. you can set it to praise and recommend your latest product. like when a pharma company has a new pill out, they’ll be able to target self-help subs and flood them with fake anecdotes and user testimony that the new pill solves all your problems and you should check it out.
the only real humans you’ll find there are the shills that run the place, and the poor suckers that fall for the scam.
it’s gonna be a shithole.
There’s a number of options including a chain of trust where you only see comments from someone who’s been verified by someone who’s been verified by someone and so on who’s been verified by an actual real human that you’ve met in person. We can also charge per post, which will rapidly drive up the cost of a botnet (as well as trim down the number of two word derails).
I’m not sure how reliable chains of trust would be. There’s a pretty obvious financial incentive for someone to simply lie and vouch for a bot etc. But in general, I think some kind of network of trustworthiness or verification as a real human will eventually be necessary. I could see PGP etc being useful.
“charge per post”
That part kind of worries me, are you proposing charging users to participate in the fediverse? Seems like it would also exclude a lot of people who can’t afford to spend money on social media…
Listen here, you! I paid good money for this here comment so you’re gonna read it, alright‽
<Brought to you by FUBAR, a corporation with huge pockets that can afford to sway opinion with lots of carefully placed bot comments>
The obvious question is then “how are they helping pay for the servers they’re using?”.
It’s not that I don’t see your point, everyone should be able to take part in a community without having to spend money, but I do find it annoying that whenever the topic of money comes up, we end up debating the hypothetical of someone with 0c spare in their budget.
Charging for membership worked well for Something Awful, and they only charge something like $20 for lifetime membership anyway, plus an additional fee for extra functionality. But you don’t get the money back if you get banned. Corporations would still be able to spend their way into the conversation, but it would be harder to create massive networks that just flood the real users.
The nice thing about federated media is that there doesn’t need to be one instance that carries most of the traffic. The cost gets distributed among many servers and instances, and they can choose how to fund the server independently (many instance owners spend their own money to a point, then bridge the gap with donations from users).
I’m just not sure that’s the best way to cut down bots, IMHO.