So seven years ago when captcha was implemented on Sup Forums to help with spam, there were about 8.2 million users monthly.
I think at this time Sup Forums was the most populated board, based on my experience.
There was hardly any relation between Sup Forums and mainstream society, it was still a unknown website but was quickly becoming more popular. People didn't really talk about Sup Forums outside of Sup Forums, social figures didn't identify as Sup Forums users, and any external attention was caused by the massive shenanigans or illegal content Sup Forums was known for at the time.
Today, there are 22 million monthly users, the most popular boards subjects involve things that generally revolve around profit (Sup Forums,Sup Forums,/biz/), or politics, both cornerstones of the outside world.
Sup Forums is also no longer taboo, cleaning up the spam, cp and the large increase in moderation has made this site much more palatable to people.
However, with this large increase of users and shift of population to boards mainly about consuming(Sup Forums,Sup Forums) or controlling (Sup Forums,/biz/), there has been a quite obvious increase in shilling.
The who of shilling does not matter, only that they do.
What matters is eventually when captcha is broken because of this shift towards AI, and when someone makes a bot which shills whatever they want, you will not be able to tell the difference between the bot or a real poster. You wont be able to tell because nearly every post on this website is succinct, loaded with repeated memes, or lacks any substance at all.
So what do? Whats to stop a fat lard from running 100 collocated raspberry pi bots simply to pony post on every fourm because some user hurt his feelings. Or some shill trying to promote his new cryptocurrency. Or video game, or political ideology, they do it already, what's to stop them from using a bot to make it look like they have lots of support, or just to drown out the competition.
What do you think?