Hacker News Reader

With agents like Finic, soon the web will be built for agents, rather than humans.

I can see a few years from now almost all web traffic is agents.

Yep. I used to be the guy responsible for bot detection at Robinhood so I can tell you firsthand it's impossible to reliably differentiate between humans and machines over a network. So either you accept being automated, or you overcorrect and block legitimate users.

I don't think the dead internet theory is true today, but I think it will be true soon. IMO that's actually a good thing, more agents representing us online = more time spent in the real world.

That is some bizarre mental gymnastics to justify the work you've done. What about the rest of us who don't want agents representing us?

If you want to use an agent for scraping/automation, you would need to supply it with auth credentials. So permission is required by default.

I think they're talking about agents that click through insurance and bank forms, not bots that post on social media.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com