Very interesting idea. I hadn't heard of the concept of the "attention economy", I've got some reading to do 😅

It would be a great to have some kind of fair, anonymous captcha type system. Bots are kind of operating in a opertunistic power vacuum, people just can't compete and the API is open enough to allow for it.

On the one hand I agree with this openness, and I know appeals to a lot of people in the name of freedom and anti-regulation. However it's missing some fairness. This "fairness" is not something everyone agrees with baking into the system though, there's a kind of lively debate about this weaved through other topics.

My prediction is that this idea will not gain enough traction to be implemented, I think people like the wild west free market unregulated angle of it, and the auto voting tools seem popular enough. So it might be worth thinking of a way to implement this on top of the system.

Also as a note on captcha in general, one great feature of some captcha is doing small pieces work that AI is not yet very good at, pattern matching and such. That's a fascinating idea and it'd be cool to work it in to any system if possible. 😎 👍

By the way, I'm working on a bot myself but only really to level the playing field for everyone. More on that soon! 😋