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Comment by drowsspa | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, robot traffic seems like an issue just because websites are horrendously inefficient. Hundreds of round-trips to external servers, languages that require some orders of magnitude more resources than needed... It shouldn't be so expensive to just serve a page, even considering robots

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> Hundreds of round-trips to external servers, languages that require some orders of magnitude more resources than needed... It shouldn't be so expensive to just serve a page, even considering robots

This is not a priority. The features are implemented by more abstraction, ie. TypeScript and web frameworks. Industry's low barrier to entry promotes studying frameworks, not technologies and standards enabling them. Anti-robot measures mostly prevent automated fraud and are there to ensure the ads are displayed, if the whole process will freeze your browser and eat your entire RAM they are fine with it.

You’re right on that part but I think it isn’t so much the server resources but the actual things the bots may be doing. For example making a ton of bot accounts to spread propaganda, or 10,000 “trial accounts” to host untraceable phishing/scam pages, etc. Or for example, an e-commerce site that doesn’t want to be automated into service as a card tester for stolen credit cards with thousands of fraudulent orders.

Your "anti-bot" mechanism can't tell propaganda from free speech.

There's nothing wrong with trial accounts. Phishing/scam pages and card testers are the problem, let law enforcement focus on what's actually illegal.

Idk what you are saying, are you suggesting if I operate a webstore I should let bots place thousands of fraud orders frequently, and eat all those chargeback fees? And… law enforcement? Call the cops every time that happens? At least in my country, the police would say “uhh, ok feel free to file a report,” but they will do zero to investigate it. Which actually makes sense since most of those doing this crime are operating overseas, out of their jurisdiction anyway.

Also, if someone is registering 10,000 accounts that are obviously not real people, I should let them?

First of all, my website, my free speech. I’m free to publish or delete anything on it.

Second, bulk-created fake accounts aren’t needed even for legitimate political speech. That’s more like extreme astroturfing.

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