Botspam apocalypse
&gt;  They&#x27;re a major part in killing off web forums, and a significant wet blanket on any sort of fun internet creativity or experimentation.<p>&gt; The only ones that can survive the robot apocalypse is large web services. Your reddits, and facebooks, and twitters, and SaaS-comment fields, and discords. They have the economies of scale to develop viable countermeasures, to hire teams of people to work on the problem full time and maybe at least keep up with the ever evolving bots.<p>This is not true at all.  There are web forums that are not &quot;web-scale&quot; and don&#x27;t spend all day fighting bot spam.  The solution is real simple: it costs 10 bux to register an account, if you&#x27;re a nuisance your account is banned and you pay 10bux to get back on.<p>Even the sites that don&#x27;t require payment for explicit registration - often succeed by gating functionality or content behind paywalls.  Requiring a &quot;premium membership&quot; to post in the classifieds forum is an extremely extremely common thing on small interest-based web-boards (photrio, pentaxforums, homebrewtalk, etc).  That income supports the site and supports the anti-bot efforts as a whole.  The customer isn&#x27;t advertisers - it&#x27;s the community itself, and you&#x27;re providing the <i>service</i> of high-quality content and access to people with similar interests.<p>You need to bootstrap a community first, of course, but it doesn&#x27;t need to be a large community, just a high-value one.<p>The twitters and facebooks of the world just don&#x27;t like that solution because they value growth above all other considerations.  They&#x27;d rather be kings of a billion user website with 200 million bots than a 1k-100k user forum with 100% organic membership and content.  And they value engagement over content quality, which is the entire reason comment-tree&#x2F;vote-based systems have been pushed heavily over web-1.0 threaded forum discussions as well.<p>This botpocalypse is the inevitable outcome <i>of the systems that social-media giants have created</i>, not inherent outcomes of the internet as a whole.