[reverendsteveii]

I came here to say exactly this. Of course bots can do things that are shitty but we need to detect and ban the behavior and resist the urge to also try to detect and ban the type of user that tends to exhibit that behavior. If a bot comes onto my page, hands off the captcha to a human, then does human things at human speed and human scale I shouldn't care that they're a bot and I should allow them to do what they're doing. If a human comes onto my page and starts trying to brute force directory structures, mass-downloading tons of huge files and otherwise causing a problem I shouldn't care that they're a human and I should block them. This whole idea of bot detection and blocking seems to be an inversion of what I think is the best design principle we've discovered in the history of software development: build things that do simple, useful things without regard to who is using them or for what, then let consumers surprise you with what they do with it. Banning non-abusive agents is just locking out potential upsides for your app.

OTOH if you make your living serving ads a bot bypassing your monetization is a problem for you. Either you detect and block them or eventually the value of an ad impression in your app will approach zero. So in some cases I guess merely not being a human is the abusive behavior.