To me, it seems like this kind of behavior could serve just to energize the evolution of online forums past the universal/passive stage. Anyone who believes that a completely open, self-running internet forum can be a place of real discussion is lazing about in the garden of eden. Bot swarms are just the serpent forcing them to take a bite already. The internet is communication infrastructure that closes distances between people, that’s pretty much it. The rest, in terms of creating discussions worth having, is up to the humans.
The OP also laments the idea that people are forced to respond to bots, thereby “wasting” their time. I’d argue that some of the finest, most lucid things I’ve read on the bbs have been in response to trolls/turfers swinging through and dropping a little turd. Only the latest example
Using Twitter as an example of internet communication vulnerability is like saying that global food security is at risk because cheese gets melty if you leave it out in the sun. It’s a bot playground, as the bar to seeming “real” is so low. As many of the commenters on the OP site said, many real people on twitter are about as helpful as a half-baked bot anyway. If you told me today that it had originally been built as a bot field-of-dreams, developed as a meta-troll just to accelerate the development of troll bots, I’d shrug agnostically.
