As
@Bravo Mod Team has explained, there are multiple types of bots. We do not allow the types of bots you are concerned about,
@Compassion: we don't allow bots to participate in discourse.
Those are not the types of bots you think they are. Those are mostly crawlers and RSS readers: they're used to populate search engines and news aggregators. They do not (and cannot) register or post content. If they were to try, they'd receive an error message on a blue page indicating that their traffic is considered high-risk. Some of you may have seen that error before if you tried to use a VPN that was also used by bots or otherwise tried to post on NamePros from a non-residential connection.
For example,
Domaining.com has software that pulls our latest blog posts and shows links on their site.
NameBio has software that pulls the latest auctions for their search engine. Both of those are bots, but they make no attempt to post content or pass as human. I think we can all agree that such bots are beneficial.
For the remainder of this post, I'm going to use the term "bot" to refer to bots that are attempting to post content and pass as human. However, this is a misleading use of the term. At NamePros, we usually use the terms "bot" and "robot" in the technical sense; I'm going to forego that for this post.
We do
not allow these types of bots on NamePros, and we go to great lengths to stop them.
That wasn't a bot, although there's often little difference between a bot and a human with bad intentions. Spam humans are often more incoherent than bots.
The majority of the seemingly-automated traffic that actually manages to post on NamePros is by underpaid humans in developing nations trying to make a living by spamming. This is difficult to block because they're
not bots.
We also do not allow members to go around accusing each other of being bots. If you suspect you're dealing with a bot, report the messages. We can very easily see on our end whether you're dealing with a bot.
No, they haven't--not in the way you're thinking.
For now, on NamePros, it doesn't need to be.
Those are, for the most part, people. Bots based on technology like GPT-3 are better than humans at exactly two things:
- Staying on topic
- Sounding coherent
Humans, on the other hand, are absolutely terrible at #1, and #2 is a crapshoot.
Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are very different from NamePros in that:
- You can essentially shout into the abyss and still go viral; you don't actually need to defend your arguments. There's a lot of emphasis on the first post in any given thread, but very little attention is given to follow-up debate.
- There are also complex algorithms to determine what's trending.
That's an environment in which bots thrive. A human can author the first post and it can be spammed all over the place by bots. The bots can then engage in coherent follow-up with respondents; it doesn't matter that there's no substance to the replies, since they're usually short and most viewers will never read them. It just boosts engagement, an effective way to game ranking algorithms.
NamePros has traditional threads and tends to sort content via simple ordering (usually the date of the last reply). For now, bots can't really survive in such an environment while simultaneously making disruptive claims--and that's without taking all of our anti-bot measures into account, which make it far more difficult.
To reiterate a point I made previously: we absolutely will not tolerate members accusing each other of being bots. Report the content in question. We can very easily see on our end whether the content is automated.
If you have questions about a particular member, and you think they're a bot, feel free to DM me and I can verify. However, I can mostly guarantee that all members participating in the Break Room with any degree of regularity are bona fide humans. I know: you're skeptical. You'd love to believe other humans couldn't possibly be so ignorant, so misguided. No real human would possibly believe all of that nonsense or be so incoherent. I assure you, though, if you were to buy a plane ticket and head to their location, you'd find a human. (Please don't actually do that.)
Just in case it wasn't clear the first two times--and because I know it's going to happen no matter how many times I warn people--do not dismiss other members' content as being posted by a bot. You are interfacing with fellow humans here, and we will not tolerate people accusing each other of being anything less.
I would love to go on a rant here about how often I see two people with different world views becoming increasingly skeptical that the other could
possibly be human. Yes, you're both human. Yes, you have very different views of the world. Get over it.
Pop quiz: how many times have I cautioned against publicly accusing other members of being bots?