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Many of the replies seem like they involved at least some human effort, although it would be nice to be sure--I wonder if there's some way to introduce some spammer-appropriate text captcha into the exchanges?

I think that's mostly because conversations in the home page are sorted by frecency right now. That naturally favors bots, because they respond more immediately.

It is mostly - but there are some where its obvious the spammer gets frustrated: "I believe you must be a fool or an idiot to think am here to play games." - Spammer [1].

[1]: https://spa.mnesty.com/conversations/meqpscxa/

> That said, I think it’s nice to be able to reflect the same attack vector upon the attackers to make the attack less efficient and hopefully less attractive.

If it's just bots replying - which honestly doesn't actually seem to be the case - I don't think it's going to make a big dent in their efficiency. It might backfire, though, and just cause more garbage traffic.