I don't disagree in principle--having something to lose also reduces cheating in games--but the devil is in the details, and there's an important difference between (A) a monetary fee (B) a refundable monetary deposit, and (C) a non-monetary expense in the form of compute-time.
I'd rather be asked to "leave this browser window open for ~30 minutes to make your account verified as it solves a math problem" versus "send us $X with your real name that you'll never see again even if our system instantly bans your account right afterwards for no reason."
This could work but I think it would need to have a threshold of say 3 free posts a day. If you want to post more it's 2c or w/e each time.
Additionally, there could be some solution around crowd sourcing the detection of humans. Not sure how exactly this would look, but it would be something like letting people tag accounts with their own perception of whether the account is a bot or not. If some threshold is met, the account gets flagged prompting more people to review it and then the account gets a special UI treatment or something.
I have little faith in crowd sourced human detection because I've been accused of botness a few times, but to the best of my knowledge I'm not one. Which is probably what a bot would say.
That's true, and I think it would need to be paired with some other features like having one account per person IRL, but it wouldn't be enforced unless the account is accused of being a bot. There are of course privacy concerns here, but it can only serve the purpose of verifying the account and does not have to be exposed to the public. I just think so far nothing creative or complex has been tried in this space.
Depends on what is meant by "small" but even if it was a $2.99 one time fee to be on X then there's a non-trivial amount of KYC info that has been collected, info that goes a long way to building valuable marketing profiles on users. Or skip the marketing angle and just use the saved payment info to develop something like "XPay" -- combine that with influencer campaigns marketing products with a "Buy it now with XPay" option and it could end up being very, very lucrative.
I'd rather be asked to "leave this browser window open for ~30 minutes to make your account verified as it solves a math problem" versus "send us $X with your real name that you'll never see again even if our system instantly bans your account right afterwards for no reason."