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by TeMPOraL 4 days ago
> The "good bots" which identify themselves and follow the rules are easy enough to block, so not a problem.

And then they get blocked, which is a problem. In particular, the modern agentic AI tools interacting with web services to fulfill user queries - they are acting as user agents, and they should not be discriminated against.

So I'd say the first pattern that needs to be broadly adopted is non-discrimination of user agents.

But of course we've tried that in the past, the whole problem is that non-browser user agents == end-user automation, which is anathema to pretty much every on-line business out there, as money made online is primarily conditioned on users wasting their own lives on interacting with services directly.