Bot Invasion: Battling the Web3 SocialFi Plague
While anyone familiar with X will understand the irritation bots cause, their effect is far more widespread than annoying comments. Despite Elon’s attempts to wipe out bots, they’re like an infection that won’t disappear.
Bots and scams plague Web3 more so than any other area of technology. Our approach isn’t to try and remove them; it’s to identify and restrict them.
Fighting bots is like playing whack-a-mole; as soon as you delete one, another quickly replaces it. Instead, Zesh’s systems are designed to identify and filter out bots, restricting their engagement and harm.
Whether it’s participating in a reward campaign, greedily hogging airdrops, spamming comments, or trying to scam community members, bots have become one of the worst aspects of Web3. They allow one person to control thousands of accounts.
A key attribute of bots is that their contributions are low-value and easy to detect. As such, our AI systems can identify them quickly and filter out their comments or engagement.
One issue that has caused a problem with some projects in the past is that by restricting bots, they can also end up restricting genuine community members. This is why we intend to create the tools to identify all low-value users rather than simply trying to get rid of them.
Identifying low-value contributors allows projects to highlight the problem and help to upskill genuine community members. One way of doing this is through the gamification strategies we’re building into our SocialFi solutions.
Leaderboards help users to see how their input and engagement are performing. For instance, rather than just rewarding people for bringing new community members into the Zesh ecosystem, we adjust rewards according to the quality of those new users.
This incentivizes ambassadors to bring in new people and improve their engagement with Zesh and the projects we work with. It naturally delegates responsibility for upskilling the community to the ambassadors.
Our approach is based on our CEO, Marius Martocsan’s decades of experience growing online communities. As Marius explains,
Real community growth doesn’t happen overnight. It requires individual members to develop responsibility for the community themselves.
Adding,
I’ve seen first-hand the strategies that work and those that fail to get engagement, and gamification is always crucial for genuine community growth. That’s why I’ve been determined to build it into every part of Zesh we can.
Gamification is a strategy that works best for humans rather than bots, so it helps our AI systems differentiate between real humans and fakes. Based on our team’s diverse backgrounds, this is just one of the unique ingredients we’re building into Zesh.