We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough.
I'm not a technical person so maybe I'm off base but...
I don't think filters are the answer. Imposing cost is. Stable coins exist now. You can spend crypto without it being a taxable event since it's pegged to the dollar.
Charge 0.10 RLUSD (10 cents) to make 50 posts or something. You just have to charge a little to make it too costly for the jeets and their bots to do it on a massive scale.
Same with email.
I don't really know why no one has done it yet.
What would happen to AOU if he tried giving us poal wallets to load with tether or something? Would the Secret Service bust down his door and shoot his dog for not having a money transmitter license?
I mean maybe a lone web dev couldn't pull it off but some San Francisco ass hats with VC money should be able to get through all the red tape.
The money thing won't work - once stuff online costs anything, most of your audience evaporates. Only the hardcore stick around, and Digg has been gone for a generation of internet users. Google knows what it is because it was very popular at one time, and it still has that SEO cachet, but no one else cares.