We've currently got a spambot talking about making $12k a month while working only 11 hours a week. The bot doesn't realize that we're trying to do even more than that for everybody. We're an obscure and fairly custom website so I'm wondering how it even got on here.
Did somebody have to program it just for Hexbear? Is it a Lemmy spambot that found our site? Are spambots now sophisticated enough to sign up to a site like ours without custom programming? Did anybody spend human effort to spam our site? I've realized I don't know much about how spambots work and would love to hear from somebody who does if we've got somebody like that here.
As for a solution, we could make our own CAPTCHA system that displays historical communist leaders and you have to select the ones that were revisionists.
I think those reasons to make an account are good. I don't see the need to force people to make an account of they don't want to comment or vote - I don't see any reason to make people make accounts that never participate, with the only benefit being an increase in account numbers -- without increasing activity. It's fine as it is I think. Unless the Koch brothers want us to exceed our 3rd quarter account number targets or they'll pull funding.
Not about forcing them, it's about giving more reasons, forcing people to get accounts sucks but you can increase reasons to get an account without any kind of horrible walls (looking at you twitter and instagram). A barrier to participation is simply not owning an account and if you can break that down with a non-participant via another means then you can remove a barrier that would lead to a casual response to something, once they've made their first tiny comment they're likely to cross a resistance threshold that leads to more. You don't get that unless they're accounted up first though.
A couple that have come to my mind recently are "get an update when the megathread is posted" and "get an update when the hexbear news roundup bulletin is posted".
There are likely many others that can be thought of, the limit is solely on our own ability to imagine ways to increase the value of an account beyond simple comment and vote participation.
Does people still need a protonmail account to sign up?
I did not need any email address to sign up a month ago.
Huh? Really?
Would I lie?
Idk I'm sure I had to use an email to create this account and not needing and email to do an account is pretty dumb
Oh wait I checked your username