[selfhoster11]

Invite-only, the way private torrent trackers still do it. Which has its own problems, but if you limit the number of invitees a given user can bring in and other such restrictions, it makes it practically impossible to for bots to make up a good chunk of the userbase.

[pajamasam]

Invite-only sounds like a good idea. Especially if you need multiple people to approve invites. However, one or a few people might get greedy and add bots.

[selfhoster11]

A lot of invite-only trackers solve that with a reputation system: if your invitees get banned, you also get warned or banned.

[hinkley]

The bots can avoid this by staying low impact. Farming data for AI training is rather simple. Vote brigading is also hard to track.

In the same way advertising is money spent hoping for revenue, shaping the visibility of posts by your actually human coworkers and customers work similarly.

[selfhoster11]

Bot presence isn't the problem, the issues caused to the community by a high volume of scraping and spam is. Bots staying low impact and not being annoying enough to get banned is almost as good as eliminating them entirely, unless you're a perfectionist.

[hinkley]

Not if they are shifting the narrative through subtler means.