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Comment by luffapi | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why programmatic access is being equated with fraud. Device identification is never a benefit for end users. Lack of privacy, waste of resources, hostile ux… we’re basically talking about DRM.

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Then start a website that doesn't try to identify and or block bots and rake in the cash from this user benefit.

My own experience briefly running sites - bot traffic is 100% trash on almost every metric. Actual conversions, spam, click fraud, other fraud (spam talking about work from home), privacy violations (trying to scrap all user profiles, capturing deleted user content etc).

I’ve run plenty of large sites and apps, and yeah I always try to represent the users in product planning and for that the reason not once have I allowed captchas, fingerprinting… to be implemented.

The real reasons people implement these draconian measures range from inept cargo culting to nefarious business models. If you have a problem with spam, add user moderation and call it a day. That’s just a justification though, there is never a pro-user reason to destroy ux and privacy.

" there is never a pro-user reason to destroy ux and privacy"

Huh?

I require users to register (little to no privacy) and pay a bit - this results in a both better user experience and is a pro-user reason to destroy privacy. You can also blacklist most of the anon email providers / do SMS verification etc

Destroying user privacy is absolutely anti-user. Why on earth would I want you, the website owner, to know who I am? I would like to remain anonymous, thus would never even consider using your site since it’s so hostile.

I’m also curious what your site is. Will you say, or do you wish to remain anonymous?

Yeah, HTTP should be a protocol that users can use freely (as long as they don't use it for Denial of Service). I don't see why I shouldn't be able to fetch a website, scrape it for information and reassemble that information in the way I want it to be presented.

> reassemble that information in the way I want it to be presented

site owners want the advertising that was embedded to be seen and thus make revenue from it.

Not all of them, some just want to sell stuff, but make it positively terrible to search for things. Some site owners provide you service, like banks, or chat services like Slack, or Jira, but the user interface is again a turd. Some just publish info on a blog, but you can expect it to go away, so why not save it for later.

Slack limits the amount of searchable messages to 10k, so if you save them regularly to local DB, you can search without limits.

All kinds of owners don't sell/show ads, or care about scraping.

It's because programmatic access on websites with anything social, or with user generated content, is very strongly correlated with spam, and spam is quite often linked with fraud of various kinds. Like 99%+ of the time if something is posted by a bot outside of any officially provided APIs, it will be unwanted by other users.

User moderation solves this. You’ll know if something is or is not wanted by users, as they will moderate the content itself.

There is no need to destroy privacy, waste resources, create terrible ux, gate content…

Bots will then generate millions of fake users, upvote their own content and downvote all other competing content.

You realize there’s no captchas or fingerprinting on this site right?

This is an absolutely tiny site.

Things that work for small sites fall apart once you get 10~100 million+ people.

Look, I help do the actual user moderation for a large (10m+) subreddit, and it is a god damn nightmare. Plus, on top of that, we have to do automated bot detection anyways, because otherwise it's just neverending bot spam.

I worked on a site with 200M active monthly users. No captchas. It’s totally doable.

Reddit is actually a good example of having millions of users with no captcha. They “fixed” their problem with user moderation.

You chose to become a moderator, so it must not be that much of a nightmare.

EDIT: Reddit does have a captcha now. My guess is it came along with the other users hostile changes in the new design.

Reddit does require a captcha and has for a long time.

edit: They have for at least the last 6 years based on online questions. Long before the new design.

I see you are correct. They did not used to though.

Reddit repost bots execute with full (though unintended) support of moderators and legitimate users.

Users have better things to do than constantly click "report spam" buttons on minor variants of the same content a million times in a row. People see spam reporting as equivalent to filing a complaint i.e. the company failed and they're informing it that it needs to do better.

Automation detection and privacy are orthogonal. The ideal bot detector yields a single bit of information: bot or not. It doesn't need to try to de-anonymize users or anything like that. As for UX, well, spam is a bad UX.

There are a million creative ways to solve this that don’t involve dark patterns, poor ux and wasted resources. This comment does a better job than I’ve done explaining:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27664604

That comment doesn't explain anything. It just says: spam? Remove the incentive.

The incentive is money. You can't just wave a magic wand and get rid of the incentive to spam things. Asserting that you can is wishful thinking.

Users definitely don’t want to be exposed to spam much less have to take action against it.

The government is giving out COVID vaccines. Appointments are free, but still difficult to come by due to limited quantities. Do you really want bots reserving all the appointments?

How does this make any money for the bot operators? Wouldn't it be easy to see who is advertising vaccination timeslots on Craigslist?

You could hire a bot service to snag a vaccine appointment sooner, while others have to wait.

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