[potamic]

Astroturfing is the biggest problem for online forums now. Bots can hide behind residential IPs and AI can generate tonnes of innocuous slop to overwhelm all other content. No human moderation will be able to keep up with it. Anyone building an online forum should think hard about this, I don't think it'll be easy to solve.

[deminature]

I've seen videos of LLM-based automated post generators running on Reddit and it's pretty horrifying. I've also witnessed large subreddits being entirely controlled by bad actors and users having no recourse. I'm definitely not leaving it solely up to human moderation, there are tons of automated detection mechanisms augmenting the human moderation and the system is being built upon every day. I know it won't be easy to solve, I'm keen that somebody should try to tackle this issue, because it's arguably the single biggest scourge of the internet right now and has serious real-world implications, like influencing the outcome of elections. The internet is real-life now, it should be tackled. The landscape is an arms race and there is too much benefit to be had by malign forces to stop trying to shape conversations with bot swarms.

As for residential IPs, I take your point that this complicates things even more. It is very difficult to know accurately which of those are being used as proxies. However, the site has a swiss-cheese model of defence, so if a user passes through one layer, they still come up against all the other layers, so losing one layer is undesirable but still manageable. Again, I cannot claim it to be perfect, but it's working decently so far.