For Paid Subscribers (December 2023)

It’s getting ever harder to distinguish humans from bots, not just because bots are becoming more humanlike, but also because humans are becoming more botlike.

As knowledge of human psychology evolves, algorithms become better at shaping human behavior.

This may be the first time we see a shift in public perspective where automated accounts and bots are not seen as bad actors on social media, but community leaders and influencers.

Bad actors want to sort out what bot styles get the most responses for engagement farming. Bluesky is light on algorithms that filter what you can see, but spammers got in the habit of exploring how the algorithms work on Twitter, Facebook, and Threads so they could exploit them.