Comment by JimDabell
> The “client-side problems” Siebenmann is talking about are the various anti-bot measures (CAPTCHAs, rate limiters, etc.)
Directly from the article:
> it's not new, and it goes well beyond anti-crawler and anti-robot defenses. As covered by people like Alex Russell, it's routine for websites to ignore most real world client side concerns (also, and including on desktops). Just recently (as of August 2025), Github put out a major update that many people are finding immensely slow even on developer desktops.
The things he links to are about things that are unrelated to anti-bot measures.
The fact is, the web is an increasingly unpleasant place to visit. Users are subject to terrible UX – dark patterns, tracking, consent popups, ads everywhere, etc.
Then along come chatbots and when somebody asks about something, they are given the response on the spot without having to battle their way through all that crap to get what they want.
Of course users are going to flock to chatbots. If a site owner is worried they are losing traffic to chatbots, perhaps they should take a long, hard look at what kind of user experience they are serving up to people.
This is like streaming media all over again. Would you rather buy a legit DVD and wait for it to arrive in the post, then wait through an unskippable lecture about piracy, then wait through unstoppable trailers, then find your way through a weird, horrible DVD menu… or would you rather download it and avoid all that? The thing that alleviated piracy was not locking things down even more, it was making the legitimate route more convenient.
We need to make websites pleasant experiences again, and we can’t do that when we care about everything else more than the user experience.
The chat bot operator slurps all websites and gives answers to all questions free of charge.
No other website can compete with that.
The whole story with streaming media is not just that pay streaming became more convenient. It’s also that content creators used legal and business mechanisms to make piracy inconvenient. They shut down Napster. They send DMCA notices. They got the DMCA enacted. They got YouTube working for them by serving ads with their content and thus monetizing it.
Chat bots are just like Napster. They’re free-riding off the content others worked to create. Just like with Napster, making websites more convenient will be only part of the answer.