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Comment by jtmarmon | Hacker News Reader

"A simple legal remedy would be a “ Blade Runner” law that makes it illegal to deploy any program that hides its real identity to pose as a human. Automated processes should be required to state, “I am a robot.” When dealing with a fake human, it would be nice to know."

what a genius idea. there's no way at all that could be used against people except for spammers

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And where do you draw the line? If you schedule a tweet to be sent in the future, is that a "bot"? And how to you make sure APIs aren't being used by bots - do you force users of 3rd party apps to enter a 1st party captcha to refresh their session every day?

Twitter already identifies what app was used to post a tweet, if you're looking through the API not their app. It would be trivial to display that information and distinguish between apps sent by humans and by automated programs.

Sure, but then you're either pushing the responsibility on twitter to monitor how every API key they give out is used and label certain apps as bots, or on the user to look up an app and determine for themselves if it's a human or a bot.

Indeed. "If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns" seems to apply here too. If anything, it will make it easier to impersonate a human, because people will assume that if it doesn't self-identify as a bot, it must be a human.

But what if the blade runners are also bots, and mistakenly ban humans? Who would you blame?

Silly idea altogether. The robots.txt is as close to this as we should go.

How would you even enforce that though.

Compare to the no-spam rules. They don't stop people from spamming, but since that thing is illegal, it can be investigated by the police and people/companies found breaking the rules can be punished.

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