5 ms·
It feels like the solution is some version of person-hood verification. Back in that day my brother and I both played on various MUDs (multi-user-dungeon/dimen
by TehCorwiz 9y ago
It feels like the solution is some version of person-hood verification.
Back in that day my brother and I both played on various MUDs (multi-user-dungeon/dimension). At the time most people had dial-up, due to my father's business we had an ISDN line and multiple computers, to prevent bots they made the assumption that multiple logins from the same IP were bots. So to combat this without blanket bans, the mods would warp us into a private area and have us type a different list of things simultaneously to satisfy themselves that we were actual people. It was a low-tech solution to a low-volume problem in a low-user-count game.
However, something similar like making the user do a captcha on each login or post if they're suspected of being a bot would be a low bar for a human to cross, but someone running a bot network would probably have to invest some time or resources into overcoming the captcha. (Mechanical Turk, machine learning, captcha farm, etc.)
- doorbumper 9y agoThe idea that real users will only be slightly inconvenienced is something I see often. However, that imposes real costs. A significant percentage of those users will not be determined enough to solve a captcha every time they login, and their usage will drop off. It's the reason I will never use CloudFlare for any product I build. Their DDOS and spam protection does protect you, but it also literally drives away users. The question Twitter should be asking is not, "Which accounts are bots?". That would just be bad business. Instead, they should be asking at what point does the presence of bots hurt the user experience more than imposing barriers on usage.