[varispeed]

Admins will see unusual traffic from that account and then take action. Of course it will not be perfect as there could be a way to mimic human traffic and slowly scrape the data anyway, that's why there is element of trust (two existing members to vouch).

[tmpz22]

Yeah don’t get me wrong I believe raising the burden of extraction is an effective strategy I just think it’s been solved at scale ie voting rings and astro turfing operations on Reddit - and at the nation state level I’d just bribe or extort the mods and admins directly (or the IT person to dump the database).

[varispeed]

That's entirely possible, especially if the site is small and not run by people with access to resources like physical security, legal etc.