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by mdominguez 3245 days ago
You're not taking into consideration the economical consequences some bots have on companies. Some bots are designed to make payments with fake or stolen credit cards. Some bots impact on people that need to manually check for submissions or takedown notices. Obviously I agree that there are legitimate use for bots and scrapers, but that admittedly low percentage of fraudulent use cases do cause a lot of harm.
1 comments

Some bot can and will use a real browser, in a real window, opening many sessions, randomising usage patterns to look more human, and continue doing what they already do.
if a human is allowed to do something on a site, it goes to reason that a bot should be allowed too (granted using the same access frequency as a human).

Blocking scraping is like DRM. Don't do it. Use a legal mechanism to deal with copyright infringement, and use acceptable usage policy to deal with heavy users that are using more than their "fair" share of bandwidth.

Some people just hire actual humans to do this, for cheap.