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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the ultimate solution is to make people pay. As in microtransactions

Human or bot is not really the problem, spam is the problem, and bots makes spam so cheap that admins can't deal with it. So, bots are banned. Human spammers can still get in, and you can pay people to solve captcha, but humans are more expensive, so there are less of them and moderators can deal with them.

If we had people (or bots) pay a few cents to access a service, it could be enough to keep spam to a manageable level.

The problem is, people don't like to pay, and unlike with phone numbers, the web doesn't have a good microtransaction architecture so behavioral analysis it is.

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Any payment system will be used to track and unmask users. Then they'll double dip selling your even better identified user data to whoever wants it. Probably while still showing you ads.

You can slowdown bots with proof of work. A crypto-miner seems like the only possible payment method that would resist tracking, I think Brave tried something similar. Not sure I like that idea!

I think “slowing down the bots with proof of work” is essentially what captchas were, back when they weee easy for us and hard for computers.

But now, when I see a captcha, I hit back, press unsubscribe, and find a new vendor. The work is harder for me than it is for a computer and so I won’t do it.

Accordingly, we can see that proof of work is the opposite of a solution.

Well... no. Proof of work doesn't mean you the human have to do work. Bitcoin is a proof of work system but you don't calculate the numbers by hand.

The question there is if an acceptable amount of work (e.g. cpu/gpu work) on a mobile phone is a large enough deterrent for a bot.

I’ve been rereading your post here and I think I’m coming around. Captcha is not proof that I did the work; it’s an inference that because I was able to do the work, it must have been easy for me (because I’m a human).

I let my my cryptoskepticism run a little too freely here. Thanks for making me think harder.

Yeah, I don't think anyone is going to pay 5 cents to see a website. That number is likely to get big real fast if you like news aggregation sites.

If the point is to stop spam it doesn't need to be implemented like that. One way to do it could be, pay $5 to create an account. Your money will be returned to you as you post on the site. If someone determines that you're spamming, any money that hasn't been returned to you is lost.

The idea is not to make people pay 5 cents to see a website. Instead replacing captchas with a toll for about how much it would cost to have a human solve the captcha for you.

If you just open HN once per day and open all promising links in a new window you're already out a lot of cents.

This will only work with mechanisms that let you pay like 0.05 cents. Should be enough to deter bots that practically run for free these days.

Too bad any intermediary will want 0.30 dollars per transaction for the 0.05 cents :)

I mean... you just batch those cents and have cash out limits. Preload accounts, etc.

* note that the word just does an obscene amount of lifting in that sentence.

There are already 'solve captcha as a service' sites all over, with highly developed APIs for their use. Lots of people use them for sneaker bots and ticket bots etc.

This is alosing idea out of the gate.

No fundamental reason a micro transaction has to be more than a tiny fraction of a penny.

How do you combine microtransactions with the need to be indexed by search engines?

Microtransactions solve the issue of bad bots, and possibly websites monetization. But then do you want to give free pass to search engine crawlers? The big ones will be strong enough to refuse to crawl your site if you don't. The small ones will be financially unable to crawl if you don't. If you allow them all, you're back to step 1. If you allow only one or a few, you basically freeze search engine innovation.

Isn't the big issue not bots reading but bots generating? You could allow bots in a read only fashion.

Spammers will have more disposable funds than me and more utility from making payments to spread their message than I will. Essentially this is more likely to exclude poor people while waving spammers on in through the ticket gate.

Not to mention credit card fees making sub $1 payments a no-go and crypto being it's own barrel of nightmares.

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