Who do we think are bots?

There's the Anti-American Bot, very demotivational, often insightful, and commenting on very old content. Spams up the place until stopped, then creates a new user name to start all over. (/u/bb3 is the latest.)

It has been guessed that Chipit and socks have used bots, but maybe that's just their personality and/or their tendency to shift topics, avoid questions, and use ad hominems and non sequiturs.

And then there are asstrolls who ape me and others (/u/Chimpit) who may or may not employ bots and/or artificially upvote the toilet "humour" that reaches the front page.

For years I've said we should make a rule that bots declare themselves, ie. /u/AntiAmericanBot, and that subs should have the right to declare themselves Bot-Free or by default be Bot-Friendly. Obviously it would be impossible to discover all the bots. But it would also be worth automating some stuff ourselves (ie. archival, fave sources, feeds, threads, etc) and worth embracing tech while preparing for the worst of it. Maybe even have dedicated subs for bots, such as /s/JimmyDore_Bot would automatically post his stuff from all the video platforms.

If SaidIt actually became significant they could destroy us easily, via bots or other crap.