Comment by decremental

Comment by decremental 11 hours ago

4 replies

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It's not that website owners don't care that they're frustrating users, losing visitors and customers, or creating a poor experience. It's an intractable problem for most website owners to combat the endless ways that their sites are being botted and bogged down, and having to pay for resources to handle the 98% of traffic their sites are getting that isn't coming from real users and customers. By all means, solve it and everyone will be happy.

nottorp 10 hours ago

Heh. Who asked those website owners to have laggy scrolling, non existent contrast, hijack my back button, generally run so much javascript that a cluster is needed client side just to display a 3 line LLM generated blog post?

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  • noirscape 5 hours ago

    To be fair, the sites resorting to extreme anti-bot measures are also often not the ones that are a clientside JavaScript hell.

    Thinking of the most extreme option (throwing proof of work checks at browsers), the main stuff that jumps to mind is sites like sourcehut, Linux Kernel Archives and so on and the admins for all of those sites have noted that the traffic they get is far outside of expectations[0]. Not whatever blogspam ended up on the top of Google search that day.

    The badly designed sites are often the ones that don't care about their bandwidth anyways.

    [0]: https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...

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  • nulbyte 8 hours ago

    This. It seems every website these days needs Javascript enabled just to load static content that could have been loaded between the time I hovered over a link and clicked it.

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  • danaris an hour ago

    You're painting with a pretty damn broad brush there.

    Do you think that every small personal website is serving nothing but "a 3 line LLM generated blog post"? Do you not think there are some out there that have perfectly reasonable content? Much of it not even monetized?

    And yet the bots are causing this problem for everyone. They are completely indiscriminate.

    So before you try to dismiss this as a non-issue, maybe consider that there's more out there being affected by this than the absolute worst case possible to imagine.

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