The plebs must not be able to talk to each other. Interfere with their conversations. Mediate them, distort them, insert your signal (theirs is the noise!), repackage them for other plebs so those plebs don’t start conversation of their own. The plebs must not be able to talk to each other.

Bots aren’t the problem. You mistake the tool for its operator by cursing a bot. If I had a specific purpose for a bot, I’d use one. The difference between my using a bot and a clickfarmer using a bot is that I wouldn’t treat Lemmy instances as a resource to be exploited (and ultimately ruined). Such an attitude would inform the how and the what behind my bot use.

The problem as always comes back to bad incentives, bad design and bad behaviour.

I can see the measures we currently take for ads (large user-maintained subscribable blocklists) being part of the solution. That, and some form of privacy-respecting POW scheme.