[qkeast]

>Still, it's a bit ironic that your own website advises people to use bots to get apartments (thus bypassing the work put into the adverts and apartment hunting sites), whilst also decrying bots who would bypass your site.

I believe these are pretty different scenarios. There's an ongoing, massive shortage of apartments in Berlin, and bots here often aren't bypassing "work put into adverts and apartment hunting sites"—they're trying to get an application in at all before the listing is flooded with hundreds of applications and disabled. The content of the application has nothing to do with it.

(Of course, this just leads to an arms race of apartment-application-bots, but this is the situation the city's found itself in. Same goes for registration appointments, residence permit applications, and so on.)

[nicbou]

If you have a zero sum game, any advice you give is creating an arms race. The only solution is to have fewer Berliners or more housing.

[mike_hearn]

Or eliminate rent control, allowing prices to float to the level people are actually willing to pay. You only see bot-driven stuff like that in cases where desirable goods are being deliberately under-priced.

[nicbou]

This will benefit the wealthier strata of society, but why does the city belong to them more than anyone else?

[mike_hearn]

Why should it belong to people who are good at botting? That's a much less fair way to allocate resources than wealth. In a free society wealth is used to buy things, that's the point of earning it. If you don't generate more wealth and you trade it away then eventually you end up poor again. If you're generating wealth continuously, then the things you can buy with it are the reward for doing so. It's much better for everyone that desirable apartments go to people who earned them rather than those who randomly managed to shave some milliseconds off a TCP connection.

[Larrikin]

The wealthy can buy bots then.