Can We Save Our Internet From The Bots, AND Preserve Anonymity?
An win-win for the ages...
Dead Internet Theory is hot right now: the idea that our beloved web is slowly becoming a bot-infested swamp devoid of authentic human content. And given we’re already knee-deep in AI slop, I’d say it’s already here. Online reviews are now meaningless. Most “news” articles on LinkedIn are self-referential LLM hallucinations. Okay sure, Linkedin has always been a ghoulfest… but have you tried shopping online for clothes lately? Search results have been taken over by “brands” selling implausibly cheap, eye-catching items that—if they ever arrive from China—look nothing like their marketing pictures.
Every act of consumption is now a negatively-weighted roll of the dice, with near zero recourse for us consumers if we get rooked. Same goes with news or political info—AI has made it easier than ever for the malicious to invent and spread targeted propaganda straight into our brain stems. I’ve noticed this personally: a growing % of replies to my X posts are clearly bots, especially when I say something about AI or the middle east, which often attract comments within minutes from a swarm of anon accounts. Most of these “accounts” don’t even follow me. It’s like they’re a drone swarm programmed to seek and attack whichever typed thoughts need to be shut down or amplified as per directive.
So how can we fight back against this army of the dead, especially on platforms like X? The midwit answer of course is: eRadiCatE aNonYMity! Just make every social media user or digital business verify themselves, faces to names, banking KYC style!
No thank you, sir—in the era of techno-capital surveillance, online anonymity may be our last bastion of freedom. For the 1 in 3 humans living under authoritarian regimes, it already is. Even supposed free-speech democracies like UK and Germany are steadily strangling themselves by the tentacles of tyranny.
(And given how fast AI-enhanced synthetic biology is being developed and democratized to every omnicidal loon with a wifi connection, and how little effort being put into defense against future pandemics, we’re probably just a couple of bioterrorism events away from full-blown surveillance states anyway…)
Nonetheless, anonymity must be preserved for as long as possible. So how to do that? It will require a deep re-questioning of our assumptions. And the first of those assumptions for the chopping block is: should online anonymity always cost nothing?
Currently, X’s business model is an inversion of reality: only those who go to the inconvenience of verifying themselves (and have the cojones to put their real name to their words) — have to pay money. Meanwhile, the spambots and anonymous trolls get a free ride. Sure, they supposedly get a small algorithm hit, but given they can just flood the system with more and more accounts at zero cost, it clearly doesn’t seem to be much of a disincentive.
This is an inversion of reality, because in the real world, it is *extremely* costly to be anonymous. IRL humans can see and remember who you are, so any anon worth their salt must isolate away, or at least build a very elaborate web of lies and misdirection about their identity. Generally speaking, you don’t get to act like an asshole with impunity and still reap the benefits of society. It’s one or the other. And this trade-off is what allows high-trust civilization to develop in the first place.
But the internet never developed such an immune system. Why? Because it is anonymous by default. Of course, this what made it so awesome: a free and open world where novel ideas and weird communities could safely emerge and flourish. At least, for a while. Inevitably, its lack of immune system allowed the grifters and psychopaths (be they humans or bots) to exploit that gentle network and ruin it for everyone else.
So why not make those who want anonymity… pay *something* for it? Right now, it costs (effectively) nothing to hide in the shadows and/or spam the network. If X truly wants to rein in the bots and trolls, improve its signal to noise ratio, *and* maintain revenue, why not flip the fee structure so that the anons pay more than the brave souls who speak under their own name? Just enough to disincentivise the spammers, but affordable enough for dissidents who need it to stay in the conversation.
AND YES, YOU CAN PAY AND STAY ANONYMOUS. We live in age of crypto. We have zero-knowledge-proof protocols like Z-Cash which let you transact without revealing to the other party who you are. If X and other platforms adopted those payment methods, we’d have a legit omni-win situation: the anon humans win, the public humans win, the platforms win, the information ecosystem wins. Sure, the bot armies lose, but they’re army of the dead anyway, so screw them.
Privacy and openness are scarce, beautiful common-pool resources that need to be protected. Our decaying internet is yet another commons befalling a tragedy, and if we want to save it from total collapse, we must protect it from those who relentlessly exploit it. Most anonymous users are good people, but most online criminals are anonymous. If you want the freedom to act with impunity, you should burden the cost of it, not everyone else.
Make the bots pay.
@livboeree That's actually a BRILLIANT Idea with exponential layers of profit potential for the social media platforms. Because, 'taxing' the bots would not only be an extra revenue source, and decrease the spam bots, but it would also increase verifiable human interactions that give advertisers reassurance their budgets are not wasted on fraudulent ad traffic. Not to mention your whole point for an overall better UX.
perfect diagnosis but the proposed solution exclusively incentivizes those willing to pay thus comments become ads and the site will optimize for this.