[matheusmoreira]

Even if I was a bot, what of it? Your site should serve bots just as well as it serves humans. Only people who care about that are those who want to monetize our eyeballs by selling our attention to the highest bidder.

If it's costing you money, have your HTTP server return 402 Payment Required instead of the free page. That's how it should be.

[Fordec]

There are vast reasons to prevent brigading, false information, information manipulation and any other number of malicious inputs that otherwise in a forum for people require trust to maintain community quality. Even for free reasons, especially say nice interest groups like one I used to be on for small satellites that got destroyed by uncontrolled bot spam.

I do not agree that every piece of the internet "should be" behind a paywall because bad actors exist. That world is the literal death of the "open" internet, putting everything behind a paywall.

[matheusmoreira]

> prevent brigading

Not something that should be prevented.

> false information, information manipulation

Not something any one person should be the arbiter of.

> and any other number of malicious inputs that otherwise in a forum for people require trust to maintain community quality

Trust is how you solve this. Forums shouldn't be letting randoms sign up and post. Just like we developers don't let randoms commit to our git repositories.

But they want that mass market appeal, don't they? They want everyone to have input access, to be able to comment and participate. Usually because they're pushing ads and the more eyeballs the better. They're hopelessly dependent on "engagement".

> That world is the literal death of the "open" internet.

Not really. It might mean the death of the "free" internet but not the "open" one. The open internet is the one where we get to use whatever software we want to interoperate without restriction. It's the one where we get to use a Python script to scrape your site if we wish to do so. It's the one where we get to download videos with yt-dlp.

[Fordec]

The project I'm currently working on is a community data aggregator for an upcoming election to improve election transparency. I will not be requesting user sign up or registration because the average age of the users will be over 45 and for a single day without getting into GDPR issues.

But I do intend to arbitrate if the election information being input from multiple geographical locations is valid data or not. Otherwise I'm not doing the project and the existing system of it only being owned by the largest political parties who have their own organization doing the tabulation. Others who have attempted this work have seen active manipulation campaigns over the course of their validation and speak to the only way to counteract the manipulation was bot control.

I do not want mass market appeal. I want the thing to get adoption for a day by people that would otherwise be casual at best internet users.

> The open internet is the one where we get to use whatever software we want to interoperate without restriction. It's the one where we get to use a Python script to scrape your site if we wish to do so

Sorry, Error 402, please provide payment. You're a bot until proven otherwise.

[matheusmoreira]

> But I do intend to arbitrate if the election information being input from multiple geographical locations is valid data or not.

How are you going to do that?

I live in a country whose supreme court routinely orders censorship of "fake news" and other kinds of "harmful" information, something not seen since the days of our military dictatorship. This year our government essentially created a ministry of truth. They censored "fake news" which literally turned out to be true after our current president was elected, it's comical.

How do you plan on being any different?

> Sorry, Error 402, please provide payment. You're a bot until proven otherwise.

OK. Do you accept credit cards?

[Fordec]

> How are you going to do that?

The same way it's organized among the political parties. Word of mouth, social media and good will among interested parties who trust each other for a common goal of maintaining democratic principles. I don't come from a country that censors such work. Their main problem is it's all pen and paper by people that are usually schoolteachers and farmers on a normal day and they need the tech help.

> OK. Do you accept credit cards?

No I do not accept credit cards. I'm neither a business nor a payment processor. Please contact the administrator. Don't expect a reply. If you have to cold call, you're not in the existing trusted network where others vouch for additions to the network and will be two-factor geo-IP verified. Good luck with your python scraping in your world.

[matheusmoreira]

If you don't want my money, then I suppose I just won't get access. That's OK.