We need a way to make commenting on social media cost something. As long as it is free there is no way humans can compete with bots. As nobody wants to spend real money on it we probably need some social credit system but one that is hard to game and probably rate limiting. We urgently need this otherwise AI will take over the world by dominating the social networks.
I know in a certain infamous forum, it was something like $10 to make an account. If you got banned, you could just fork out another $10 on a new account. Which certainly limited some behaviors, or at least made them expensive.
Depending on the implementation of a pay-to-comment scenario, it could still be profitable for the scammers to pay. They would definitely be tracking CTR or whatever their equivalent is on scam campaigns.
In this case, the scammers are all using similar profile photos, so that part of the whack-a-mole seems like easy pickins. At least at creation time, they could fuzzy compare the profile photos of the commenter and the channel. And compare among other commenters.
The scammers would definitely move on to something else, but it seems like the scammers are scoring a lot of really easy wins right now.
I hate scammers and I love ruining their day, but this is one of many areas where I can't give more attention to it than the platform can.
This feels like it could work in a way that would make Youtube money on scammers for a short period of time.
Could grandfather in existing accounts, and have existing accounts give references for new accounts to continue getting "free" accounts. The cost being a loss of the ability to "mint" new accounts if any of your existing referenced accounts start spamming.
So you want to comment with your new account, you either need a "mint" from an existing account, or you need to fork over... let's say $50 to activate comments. (Amount could be whatever).
Isn’t this sort of what Twitter is trying with the $8/month thing? Forcing a cost to increase the barrier to posting as well as tie it to a human to go after when they do bad stuff.
This has always been a dilemma to me as identity proofing costs some money and that filters people out.
I remember when domain names went from free to $70 under network solutions. This was meant to be cheap but really limited people who could register domains.
