this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Well, you have to limit the number of accounts they can possibly have by whatever method possible, either by charging per account or some sort of proof of work or phone number verification or something that limits the amount of accounts that they can have. Once you have done that, what you need to do is cost them something such as how proof of work costs computing resources. If it takes 10 seconds to post a tweet, then sending out 1 million tweets takes 1 million times 10 seconds or 10 million seconds, or 166,666 minutes or 2777 hours or 115.7 days And that's all from a 10 second Proof of work requirement. For a regular user, that's not a problem. For a spammer, that's a huge problem.
What your talking about is rate limiting. And pretty much every social media already does that. The issue with adding requirements like phone number etc, is that it also makes it more difficult and annoying for regular users. Besides, bot account owners litteraly have large amounts of fake valid mobile phone numbers they can use to "verify" their bot accounts. Then they also use change their ip addresses, so rate limiting can't be enforced. Instagram also has a massive bot issue, but its just an endless amount of bot accounts, not just one that is spamming all over the place.
Adding a fake 10 second delay would stop absolutely nothing and make the experience even worse for regular users.