Was.
Maybe you are to young to remember the (pre-spam) days when it was polite to leave your SMTP server open for others to use?
Yep. Was.
This isn’t the internet you grow up on. This is an internet scoped for bots and organizations.
Also, I imagine it's not impossible to reliably distinguish between an autopen and genuine handwriting. The company who's site you linked say their machine can't perform complex pen movements so calligraphy is impossible.
The real advantage of posting a letter is that you have to pay for postage, and the stamps on the envelope will indicate which country the letter is really coming from.
Not including the cost of the letter itself, or the envelope, or the cost to write it if it's being farmed out to overseas labour, who then has to send it by international postage. And then you have evidence of where the letter originated, and that can be compared with how the user presents themselves online.
Little bit more than 2 hours minimum wage I think.
Sorry, they did an interview about 20 years back were they kept correcting the host to 'Something is awful' I have just called it that ever since.
It'll stop the ones doing it for the lols, but I imagine they're a minority anyway.
The people leaving LLM replies are paying minimum $20/month for LLM access, and probably more in practice.
A one time $10 fee is not a deterrent.
1) the cost becomes even higher for AI slop factories since they will probably get multiple accounts banned.
2) It prevents influence to accrue to any specific account. This diminishes the incentive for slop, since sufficient success means a ban.
3) It reduces the moderation effort since creating accounts is no longer a sustainable strategy.
Bots are indeed killing twitter now. I noticed more and more were leaving permanently. Musk evidently accelerated the decay here. There is something wrong with his mindset here, it's almost as if it is pathological. His perception of things is genuinely distorted, and I am not even 100% certain he is completely aware of it; he must be partially aware, but it seems there is also something wrong with the brain. No wonder he gets along with Trump - that one now has clearly dementia narcissism in the final stage.
You add a barrier here. You think that your solution means that AI is reduced, but you also reduce real humans. I noticed this with other parts too, such as "you need to verify your identity before you can post to the ruby issue tracker". I can do so, but I need my tablet and this takes me more time than before, so I stopped using the ruby issue tracker altogether. (It's not the only reason, but adding barriers really makes me invest my time elsewhere - more likely to do so at the least.)
You always need to consider all trade-offs. Charging money means you will also offset real humans at the same time. And it's not solely about the cost; it is simply a hassle to want to do so. For similar reasons I also rarely register at a phpbb forum - I need to store the password to not forget it etc... so more hassle. Using a password manager is also more of a hassle.
I "log in with Instagram", where "I log in with Facebook". Guess how well data recovery works when there is literally no password set. I'm surprised these systems work at all.
On completely different scales. Even if it not perfect, it is strong enough of a filter to turn a bot infestation into a mild annoyance.
Both sites have survived and continue to work well for their users.
A small cost does definitely work for some sites.
Sure, it might stop 10% of the bad actors and lower the numbers, but it'll stop 80% of the good users who aren't experts at getting around the cost or don't have an income from using the service to just pay it as a cost of business.