[adefee]

We can guarantee that all accounts are Humans, actually - it's part of what makes us special :) Also, FB/Tw have a vested interest in allowing bots. When I run an ad on FB (no ads on Equal, btw!) I'm paying for impressions, many of which are bots. FB is making money off of bot and botted content, I'd argue they have a conflict of interest in removing bots. We have no such issues :)

[bastawhiz]

No, you really can't. Whatever verification you ask for can be faked (increasingly trivially with AI). You can't even rely on calling the users on video to verify their identity.

I run a startup hosting podcasts (that is, literally the file hosting). Advertisers with literally nothing to gain because inactive feeds are invalid will sign up for accounts and post spam. They literally have humans overseas sign up for Gmail accounts and go through the full signup and verification and captcha just to post some garbage links.

If they'll go through that much effort for my startup where there's literally zero payoff, they'll do it to yours. I promise you, you're not going to win the war on bots. Maybe for a while until you grow, but mark my words.

[adefee]

Appreciate the spirit of your comment and agree it's a big thing to tackle. We've worked hard on this aspect in particular, before anything else. Our core codebase is built around much of this (releasing more details closer to/at launch) - and we're using methods that have been proven to work in several large countries/industries (particularly in video games where botting & hacking is also a major concern). At the time the user creates an account, we know that they are a human and that they are relatively unique. We don't allow users to create multiple accounts.