Keeping the Internet Human

I don't think it needs to be restated that most of the internet is bots. So this will just be a brief overview on current methods to ensure internet posters are HUMAN, along with my thoughts on what the best solutions may be.
In a perfect world we will be able to know 95% of postings are human while also allowing posters to maintain pseudo-anonymity.

Captchas

Captchas are simple and privacy respecting, but annoying to deal with and easily circumvented by motivated botters, with captcha solving services as cheap as .0003 a cent per captcha. [1]

SMS Verification

SMS verification is not privacy respecting unless users are out buying burners, and it's also easily circumvented with SMS verification services running at .0079 cents per message. [2]

Participation Requires a Subscription

It's becoming more common for traditionally free services having paid alternatives. Kagi for search, Nebula for videos, Medium for blogs. Subscription based services have a much higher quality product than their free counterparts and tend to be more privacy respecting as the business model is not centered around data collection and ad delivery. Social services like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat have been offering premium subscriptions to provide extra features, but there's yet to be an exclusively paid forum / twitter / social-media platform. It seems social media platforms require getting big to be captivating (network effects), and they can't get big if it's paid to begin with.

People don't seem to mind paying though, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, and even traditional news [3] have plenty of subscribers.

Digital ID

Digital Identity is also being pushed as a way to "solve" covid / election / general misinformation. [4] Mr. Bill gates has been investing a lot of money into Digital IDs. [5] Most European countries have their own form of Digital ID, and although most services are related to public administration or banking, some private services are allowing you to sign-up using your Digital ID. In some countries the digital ID is used to do just about everything; banking, confirming online purchases, sending money, and taking public transport. [6]

In the US digital ID is shaping up to be an extension of Google / Apple Pay, rather than a direct government led endeavor and app. [7] But some are state-led. [8] Americans generally seem to trust private corporations more than government, even though they're symbiotic (people will happily install an Amazon Echo and Ring but object to government installed cameras). The goal seems to be instead of having your wallet and phone, you just bring your phone with you which handles banking, taxes, payments, drivers-license, and probably soon enough, authentication with social internet platforms.

A Digital ID has its fair share of critics for aiding in a surveillance state. [9] [10] [11] Generally though critics see Digital ID as an inevitability and are advocating for open-standards and individual ownership, with you explicitly choosing what parts of your Digital ID to share and what not. This would be effective at stopping bot-campaigns and could be implemented in a way that maintains individual ownership, with social services knowing your ID is valid and hasn't been used before, but not able to know your PII (think as if your SSN was your private PGP key and you provide your public to services). I think in a world where a Digital ID is required for twitter sign-ups, regardless of how well implemented, identity theft and broad phishing scams would see an exponential rise, with the elderly being disproportionately harmed.

Handwriting everything

One forum-poster I saw, for a while, wrote all their posts in cursive and then took a picture and uploaded it. This is privacy respecting, free, and maintains pseudo-anonymity. There's arguments to be made with how posting handwriting would be vulnerable to graphology and thus non-private, but even your ASCII posting is vulnerable to stylometry so I don't think it's a valid criticism. It is though inconvenient and kind of unnatural, but I can see a niche-forum succeeding where only images of hand-writing or drawings are allowed, but this is no global solution.

Speaking In-front of a Camera

In a way TikTok is great for human created media. You know it's not a bot when it's a flesh and blood human speaking the message, thankfully even the best CGI and AI faces fall into the uncanny valley. Young people use TikTok to find human created information about things way more than using the wasteland of SEO and AI results that is Google search. [12] But this is not privacy respecting.

My own thoughts

Personally I think the normie-net will be more human in 10 years, but much more walled, with Digital ID being a pre-requisite to participation. I think almost all pseudonymous and human communications will be limited to the underground of niche forums, image boards, and chat-rooms. I think they'll be staying bot-free mostly for not being a target of psy-ops due to their underground nature and limited userbase, with technical solutions being the lesser factor.

I think overall this will be a net-bad. More things will go the way of Discord where it's non-indexable by search engines, or like Facebook where it is but requires an account to view. More platforms are locking things up, in part because now human created text is a valuable commodity for AI training. The normie-net will mostly be phone posters on their apps, the true Web 3.0. This though will be the plague, that I think, will bring the renaissance of the community web.