You can just get rid of the whole payment thing and go with invite codes alone. Of course you’ll be limiting registration speed massively (which may not be good depending on if you’re in the middle of a Reddit exodus or not), but it is mostly bot-proof. Tildes seems to have pulled it off.
Invites work in the short term but once the bots get a foothold it quickly falls apart. Back when Gmail was invite only it took only a few months for websites to pop up that automated invite distribution.
You can just get rid of the whole payment thing and go with invite codes alone. Of course you’ll be limiting registration speed massively (which may not be good depending on if you’re in the middle of a Reddit exodus or not), but it is mostly bot-proof. Tildes seems to have pulled it off.
Invites work in the short term but once the bots get a foothold it quickly falls apart. Back when Gmail was invite only it took only a few months for websites to pop up that automated invite distribution.