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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

This is another one of those horse-blinders style arguments that considers only for-profit/institutional/etc contexts and so doesn't realize their very method of measuring something through javascript program execution is biased or that it's creepy.

I'm a human, I don't execute javascript programs and by default my browser does not either. Anyone using this will label me a bot.

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Hello! Author of the article here. I am working on this because I had one of my websites (which served downloads related to the game Minecraft) flooded with hundreds of thousands of requests coming from scraper bots from all around the world that even tried to download the files.

This made me hit the bandwith cap of my hosting provider and had to pay extra per TB used that month from my own pocket, since the website was not making a profit at all.

I never thought of increasing profits for any institution, but to stop the waste of bandwith many independent websites suffer.

if by "bot" we mean "not economically interesting", aren't websites within their right to filter our hacker-nerds who probably won't click on ads and buy useless objects?

the ratio of this comment vs. parent is absurd. tfa's prior mentions "anti-cheat" in games. while cheaters do suck, a lot of draconian trash has crept in under the guise of that banner.

i have been finding my locked down experience has been becoming degraded lately fwiw. i am not economically "interesting", and the consequences of valuing privacy in 2026 is limiting information access. shame really.

You're absolutely right. The modern meaning of "bot" is "not economically exploitable". I wish they'd just say that rather than using the plausible deniability for what they doing re: "bots".

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