Comment by marginalia_nu

Given that curl-impersonate[1] exists and that a major player in this space is also looking for experience with this library, I'm pretty sure forcing the execution of JS using DOM stuff would be a much more effective deterrent to prevent scraping.

[1] https://github.com/lwthiker/curl-impersonate

I have been web searching using Google from the command line, with no Javascript, for decades. Until last week I never sent a User Agent HTTP header either. After this change I'm still searching from the command line, no Javascript. Thus "requiring Javascript" is not a correct phrase to describe this change. The requirement is a User Agent HTTP header with an approved value. The only difference in searching for me as of the last few days is that I now send a User Agent HTTP header, with an "approved" string.

Javascript does not stop bots. At least it does not stop Googlebot.

IMO, the change is to funnel more people (cf. bots) into seeing AI-generated search results. The "AI" garbage requires Javascript. That is why the spokesperson suggests "degraded" search results for people who are not using Javascript. For me, the results are improved by avoiding the AI garbage, not degraded.

"Why didn't they do it earlier?" is a fallacious argument.

If we accepted it, there would basically only be a single point in time where a change like this could be legitimately made. If the change is made before there is a large enough problem, you'll argue the change was unnecessary. If it's made after, you'll argue the change should have been made sooner.

"They've already done something else" isn't quite as logically fallacious, but shows that you don't experience dealing with adversarial application domains.

Adversarial problems, which scraping is, are dynamic and iterative games. The attacker and defender are stuck in an endless loop of game and counterplay, unless one side gives up. There's no point in defending against attacks that aren't happening -- it's not just useless, but probably harmful, because every defense has some cost in friction to legitimate users.

> My guess is it had more to do with squeezing out more profit from that supposed 0.1% of users.

Yes, that kind of thing is very easy to just assert. But just think about it for like two seconds. How much more revenue are you going to make per user? None. Users without JS are still shown ads. JS is not necessary for ad targeting either.

It seems just as plausible that this is losing them some revenue, because some proprortion of the people using the site without JS will stop using it rather than enable JS.

The problem is accountability. Imagine starting a trade show business in the physical world as an example.

One day you start getting a bunch of people come in to mess with the place. You can identify them and their organization, then promptly remove them. If they continue, there are legal ramifications.

On the web, these people can be robots that look just like real people until you spend a while studying their behavior. Worse if they’re real people being paid for sabotage.

In the real world, you arrest them and find the source. Online they can remain anonymous and protected. What recourse do we have beyond splitting the web into a “verified ID” web, and a pseudonymous analog? We can’t keep treating potential computer engagement the same as human forever. As AI agents inevitably get cheaper and harder to detect, what choice will we have?

> I'm appalled by some of the discussions here. Was I "enshittifying" my website out of unbridled "greed"? I don't think so. But every time I come here, I find these accusations, which makes me think that as a website with technical users, we can definitely do better.

It's if nothing else very evident most people fundamentally don't understand what an adversarial shit show running a public web service is.

There's a certain relatively tiny audience that has congregated on HN for whom hating ads is a kind of religion and google is the great satan.

Threads like this are where they come to affirm their beliefs with fellow adherents.

Comments like yours, those that imply there might be some valid reason for a move like this (even with degrees of separation) are simply heretical. I think these people cling to an internet circa 2002ish and the solution to all problems with the modern internet is to make the internet go back to 2002.

20000 RPS is very little — a web app / database running on an ordinary desktop computer can process up to 10000 RPS on a bare-metal configuration after some basic optimization. If that is half of your total average load, a single co-located server should be enough to eat entire "attack" without flinching. If you have "competitors" and I assume, that this is some kind of commercial product (including running profitable advertising-based business), you should probably have multiple geographically distributed servers and some kind of BGP-based DDoS protection.

Regarding Tor nodes — there is nothing wrong with locking them out, especially if your website isn't geo-blocked by any governments and there are no privacy concerns related to accessing it.

If, like Google, you lock out EVERYONE, even your logged in users, whose identities and payment details you have already confirmed, then... yes you are "enshittifying" or have ulterior motives.

> they were using real Gmail accounts to sign up

Using Gmail should be a red flag on its own. Google accounts can be purchased by millions, and immediately get resold after being blocked by target website. Same for phones. Only your own accounts / captchas / site rep can be treated as basis of trust. Confirmation e-mail is a mere formality to have some way of contacting your human users. By the time Reddit was created it was already useless as security measure.

Most black hat spammers use botnets, especially against bigger targets which have enough traffic to build statistics to fingerprint clients and map out bad ASNs and so on, and most botnets are low powered. You're not running chrome on a smart fridge or an enterprise router.

A major player in this space is apparently looking for people experienced in scraping without using browser automation. My guess is that not running a browser results in using far fewer resources, thus reducing their costs heavily.

Running a headless browser also means that any differences in the headless environment vs. a "headed" one can be discovered, as well as any of your Javascript executing within the page, which significantly makes it difficult to scale your operation.

so much more expensive and slow vs just scraping the html. It is not hard to scrape raw html if the target is well-defined (like google).

The only issue with a hash cash is there’s no way to know whether the user’s browser is the one who computed said proof of work, or has delegated it to a different system and is simply relaying its results. At scale, you’d end up with a large botnet that receives proof of work tokens to solve for the scraping network to use.