Recently, the product head of platform X, Nikita Bier, publicly raised a new version of an old problem: the comment section of encrypted accounts is almost completely dominated by spam replies and mechanized interactions. In his description, most of the likes, comments, and shares seen under encrypted content do not come from real users, but are driven by automated scripts and bulk accounts. The set of data cited by Bier is even more eye-catching—he estimates that about 80% of interactions and activities in the crypto space are completed by bots. After acknowledging that existing technology cannot completely solve this problem, his so-called "only solution" is to introduce a product mechanism called "two-level reply restriction," admitting that this will inevitably bring strong controversy. The real issue being put on the table around this plan is the long-term struggle between the governance logic of encrypted social platforms and the real user experience.

80% of interactions by bots: The alienation of the comment section in encrypted social

In the crypto world, opening any popular account's X dynamics often reveals a highly similar scene in the comment section: dense airdrop links, project promotion accounts, suspicious phishing websites, and templated “interactions” flooding the screen, with real discussions related to the content pushed down to dozens of comments afterward, making them difficult to see at first glance. For users accustomed to using social media for project information and tracking on-chain dynamics, the comment section should have been a window for capturing market sentiment and on-the-ground feedback, but now it resembles a hub of noise.

In this context, Bier’s assertion of "about 80% of crypto interaction driven by bots" intuitively outlines the plight of real users: they are voicing their opinions on a stage magnified by data, yet it is hard for them to hear each other. For most ordinary users, the number of likes, shares, and comments no longer signifies “many people are seriously discussing,” but feels more like background noise generated by bots. Content creators and project teams also face dilemmas—they cannot easily judge how many of the hundreds or thousands of interactions under a post come from genuine potential users and how many are just bots completing tasks.

The high return expectations of the crypto industry and the strong anonymous atmosphere provide fertile ground for all of this. On one hand, from airdrop mining to community points, project teams generally distribute incentives through “interaction tasks,” directly turning likes, comments, and shares into quantifiable entry points for profit, leading to a natural demand for bots to inflate numbers; on the other hand, crypto social users’ identities are often weakly tied to reality, with the cost of mass registration and rotating accounts being very low, allowing ordinary users to protect their privacy while providing almost no barriers to the army of bots. The result is that the surface data of the platform continues to expand, but the density and credibility of information are continuously diluted.

This kind of distorted interaction impacts crypto projects and the entire information ecosystem on multiple levels. On one hand, the "community heat" on the surface for projects is significantly inflated by a large amount of fake interactions, obscuring the brand reputation behind dazzling numbers, making it hard for users willing to invest time and money to distinguish quality projects through signal noise; on the other hand, the efficiency of information retrieval is severely affected, with researchers and ordinary users needing to spend more time sifting through content to find a few valuable viewpoints from screens filled with meaningless replies, thus invisibly raising the attention cost across the industry.

X product head reveals the limitations of technical methods

The core issue raised by Bier in this discussion is not just another accusation of "too many bots," but his public admission that existing technological means struggle to completely solve the spam reply problem. In the narrative of traditional platform governance, anti-spam and anti-bot measures are typically described as engineering problems that can be "optimized" gradually through algorithms and risk control: better models, more refined features, stricter rules. However, this logic is reaching its ceiling in the crypto context.

The reason lies in the fact that the boundary between bots and real people on crypto social platforms is greatly blurred by the industry's characteristics. Traditional risk control often relies on behavioral patterns, device fingerprints, access frequency, and other metrics to identify abnormal accounts; however, in the crypto ecosystem, real users themselves are highly fragmented and multi-accounted, with actions like frequently switching wallets, registering small accounts, and participating in airdrop tasks being the norm, making many "real behaviors" look very similar to bot activities on the data side. If algorithms are tightened indiscriminately, they will continually swing between misfiring at numerous real users and allowing bots to run rampant.

At the same time, platforms have hesitated for years between "opening up crypto topic traffic" and "strongly cracking down on bots." On one hand, crypto content has a strong discussion and dissemination potential, serving as a key engine for boosting platform activity and online duration; on the other hand, allowing indiscriminate bot traffic to flood in could backfire on the overall user experience, dragging down product reputation. In this tug-of-war between growth impulse and governance pressure, Bier's "reveal" is particularly significant—he chooses to no longer hide the illusion of technology being all-powerful, but rather directly convey to users that relying solely on identification and banning makes it difficult for platforms to win this war.

This "acknowledgment of technology’s ceiling" statement impacts user and industry psychology. For users accustomed to viewing large platform risk control as a safety baseline, it signifies that the spam information flooding the comment section is no longer just a "temporarily not yet optimized" issue but could become a long-term norm; for project teams and advertisers, it also forces them to rethink whether continuing to budget on a platform that openly admits it cannot purify interaction quality is still worth it.

Two-level reply restriction: the only solution or harm to deep discussion

After giving the judgment of "no technical solution," Bier put forward the so-called "only solution": to enable a "two-level reply restriction" mechanism at the product level. The basic idea is to impose hard constraints on the speaking levels of a single account within an interaction chain. Simply put, after a user initiates a comment under a dynamic post, they can make a few additional replies within a limited level but cannot infinitely expand branching dialogue downwards, thus structurally compressing the entire comment tree’s depth and diffusion path.

For bot clusters aiming to flood the screen with excessive replies, this type of restriction significantly raises operational costs. Bots that could previously create a massive interactive "waterfall" by repeatedly replying, tagging each other, and nesting comments on the same content are now forced to squeeze their limited speaking opportunities into fewer nodes, making it difficult to spread out hundreds or thousands of layers of spam dialogue under a hot post as they did before. This not only weakens the visibility of spam information under the same content but also structurally compresses their opportunities for broader user dissemination.

However, at the same time, the potential side effects of this mechanism are also quite clear: in-depth discussions among real users may be forcibly interrupted. In the crypto community, many high-quality conversations precisely occur within the long chains of questioning and clarification; researchers, developers, and investors often need multiple rounds of exchanges to reach a consensus on a particular technical detail or governance proposal. The two-level reply restriction will force these discussions to be compressed into a few exchanges, with excess portions either forcibly migrating to private messages and small groups or directly disappearing from the public view, potentially harming community engagement and the richness of public discussions.

From the platform's perspective, this represents a very clear governance orientation choice: better to sacrifice some depth of discussion to trade for "visible cleanliness". For most light users, no longer being overwhelmed by a thick layer of spam replies upon entering the comment section is indeed an intuitively perceptible improvement in experience; but for those who rely on public comment sections for high-intensity exchanges, the flattened dialogue structure also means their original public stage is shrinking. This choice to sacrifice structural complexity for visual cleanliness is essentially a reconstruction of the dialogue form.

The trade-off of platform governance: growth impulse and experience baseline

Looking back at the development path of crypto social platforms, it is not difficult to see that during the early expansion phase, "growth" and "activity level" almost overwhelmingly overshadowed all other goals. Whether in the encrypted sections of centralized platforms or native crypto social applications, the broadly defined "bot traffic" has been tacitly permitted or even passively accepted for a long time: bot followers, auto-comments, and scripted shares have all been simply counted as "interactions" in statistical reports, providing the platform's story with a beautiful curve. For those eager to demonstrate their grasp of the cyclical dividend, this approach is highly tempting in the short term.

Now, when cleaning up spam replies is put to the forefront, its direct outcome is that at least at the data level, it will lower publicly visible interaction metrics. A decrease in comment counts, a slowdown in sharing rhythms, and the smoothing of certain topic heat curves may all be interpreted as "community cooling" or "market cooling." However, from a longer-term perspective, purifying interaction quality can help enhance the platform’s overall brand, attracting users who are willing to continuously produce high-quality content and in-depth viewpoints—these users are often not driven by one-time rewards, but are key groups determining the community's "intellectual ceiling."

In this process, advertisers, project teams, and ordinary users do not have consistent preferences regarding "interaction quantity" and "interaction authenticity." Some advertisers and short-cycle projects care more about data scale to narrate exposure stories externally; whereas teams wishing to run brands long-term care more about the actual audience structure they are reaching and whether they can get effective feedback from comments; as for ordinary users, they are attracted by high interaction numbers for clicks but weary of sifting through the comment section for useful information. Mechanisms like two-level reply restriction actually sort different groups at the platform level—who's demands are prioritized, and who’s needs are marginalized.

In other words, this is not a simple technical adjustment but a struggle over power distribution. The platform, by adjusting interaction structures, determines which voices are more easily heard in public spaces and which discussions get squeezed into invisible corners; it decides whether to continue pleasing traffic players with "liveliness" or gradually tilt towards "usability," seeking users with higher information quality requirements.

From X to the entire industry: will encrypted social move towards “high-threshold dialogue”?

Bier and X's choices are unlikely to be confined to a single platform. As one of the current social arenas with the most concentrated crypto topics and discourse power, X's governance path resembles a frontier for the entire industry—other encrypted social products and community applications will either view it as a model to emulate or deliberately head in the opposite direction, emphasizing “openness” and “unrestricted” to attract confrontational users. Regardless of which path, the governance issue surrounding bots and spam interactions will become a standard topic in the next round of product narratives.

Continuing along this trend, it is predictable that more interaction restriction mechanisms based on account credibility, payment thresholds, or on-chain identities will be proposed and tested. Account credibility could be built through dimensions like long-term behavior, level of attention received, and historical reporting records, determining a user’s visibility in public discussions; payment thresholds might be implemented through subscriptions, tipping, or deposits, adding economic costs to speaking behavior to curb mass abuse; on-chain identities would consider address history, asset status, or governance participation records, constructing an interaction space that emphasizes identity over accounts. All these mechanisms point in one direction: to significantly raise the costs of “carelessly flooding a screen with spam.”

The direct consequence of raising thresholds is that ordinary and new users may be partially pushed out from central dialogue spaces, while professional users and institutions obtain a clearer dialogue environment within higher threshold spaces. For newcomers just entering the crypto world, wanting to voice their opinion in those spaces may require prior accumulation of certain “credentials” on-chain, in the community, or within wallets; but for teams and researchers that have been deeply engaged in the industry for years, this filtering may instead help improve communication efficiency, avoiding being drowned in endless noise.

In a more macro context, the enthusiasm of AI technology and capital for related startups makes it likely that the future "battle between bots and anti-bots" will escalate. On one side, generative models continuously enhance content production and dialogue disguising abilities, making bots more challenging to capture using traditional features; on the other side, new generation tools focusing on anti-spam, identity verification, and behavior modeling receive funding and resource tilts. Crypto social platforms are caught between these two forces, being forced to constantly redefine the lines between openness, privacy, identity, and governance.

After the noise: where will the power of discourse in crypto fall?

Returning to the origin of this debate—the rampant presence of bots in the crypto circle, the limiting approaches of technical means nearing their ceiling, and structural constraints like "two-level reply restrictions"—the core tension among these three factors lies in how platforms reshape public space within controllable boundaries. Acknowledging that technology cannot completely clear the area means the noise will not disappear but can only be redistributed; introducing rigid interaction restrictions consciously adjusts the ratio between noise and information, making certain types of voices harder to reach users.

In this process, every governance choice made by the platform reshapes the pattern of discourse power: Who can be easily seen, who exists only in collapsed comments or private groups; who can shape the “main melody” of public opinion through high-frequency interactions, and who passively accepts a reality that has already been filtered and appears clean but is limited in levels. For industry participants who are used to evaluating projects and community heat based on "data," this also means they must re-examine the value behind "high interaction"—among those seemingly bustling numbers, how much true attention exists and how much remains from inflated metrics.

Consequently, there will be adjustments to trust logic. Project teams can no longer simply equate comment counts with community recognition; users can no longer continue using share counts as the main basis for judging the importance of information. A more realistic approach is to focus on the identity structure behind interactions, the density of discussion content, and the extension of these interactions in higher threshold spaces. Truly valuable crypto discussion spaces are likely to gradually migrate from public comment sections to smaller spaces with stricter entry thresholds, emphasizing credibility and long-term participation—whether closed-door communities, governance forums, or professionally focused discussion platforms based on on-chain identity.

The noise will not disappear; it will only be reallocated. For every crypto participant within it, understanding the trade-off logic behind platform governance and learning to interpret the filtered information structures is becoming a new mandatory course.

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