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Note that Google's version of this was determined to be checking whether you had a 9-day-old tracking cookie. The researcher who discovered this was able to generate 60,000 "I am not a bot" cookies per day, and use them up about 15 times each in a bot before it started getting captchas. That was in 2016 though.
Couldn't the content of that cookie be used to validate its actual age? Like, just signing the date of generation?
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True. But AI does not close your question because it didn’t like your phrasing.
I've had sufficiently similar experiences. Usually an LLM chatbot going off half-cocked before I'd fully specified my question, and taking offence to my "please shut the fuck up" (usually after a series of requests to stop). I suspect if I'd kept that up the session might well have closed.
AI is killing my website but in a different way than what's discussed in the article: Content scrapers are completely out of control, spiking my serving costs and degrading performance for human users. There seem to be hundreds of them and they've gotten very good at looking like human users so they're hard to block or throttle. I can't prove they're all AI-related scrapers, but I've been running the site for 25 year…
Can't you use Captcha services? If the big tech captcha services are too costly, one could create a rudimentary captcha defense against these bots pretty easily. Am I missing something?
I like the Cloudflare challenge ideas suggested on this thread, though, I might try them again.
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I'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent, Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again. Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do t…
>and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again. Cloudflare no longer does CAPTCHAs so even if users get flagged as bots, the user experience isn't terrible. You just have to click on a box and you're on your way. It adds maybe 3s of delay, far better than anti-bot solutions that require you to solve an captcha, or imperva's (?) challenge that requires you…
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I'm on AWS and use their WAF service to do some rudimentary bot blocking, but CDNs (their Cloudflare equivalent, Cloudfront) have been too expensive in the past and the bot control mechanisms they offer have too many false positives. Perhaps I should check it out again. Part of the problem is the economics of it -- I've chosen to self-fund a high traffic site without ads, and that's on me. But it was possible to do t…
Cloudflare is free. Give it a try.
The ones that struggle had pre-existing issues : - quora pivoted from quality content to cheap clickbait - SO has overbearing moderation. Chatgpt doesn't close your question the second you've submitted it. And so on. In short, quality platforms are fine.
Hm, not sure I agree with you about SO. The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. That's a pretty great experience, and I certainly wouldn't say that it misses the bar to be a 'quality platform'. I do agree the moderation is overbearing at times, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwate…
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The early days of Quora was incredibly high quality content from experts in all sorts of fields. Was probably my favorite website, then they decided to start paying people for questions / answers and it all went to shit so incredibly quickly. The site today is completely unrecognizable from it's origins, really sad.
This is incidentally an endemic problem of online discussion sites. There is only one possible quality flow gradient, and that is downwards. If a site begins well , with high-quality and relevant content, then those who wish to exploitatively extract value from that factor will be attracted to it. Eventually the clue up and leaves. If a site begins poorly , with low-quality and irrelevant content, and quite often, ab…
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Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.
The early days of Quora was incredibly high quality content from experts in all sorts of fields. Was probably my favorite website, then they decided to start paying people for questions / answers and it all went to shit so incredibly quickly. The site today is completely unrecognizable from it's origins, really sad.
I'm surprised it still exists at this point. Who is it for now?
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Hm, not sure I agree with you about SO. The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. That's a pretty great experience, and I certainly wouldn't say that it misses the bar to be a 'quality platform'. I do agree the moderation is overbearing at times, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwate…
The problem with SO is that obsolete answers are never marked as such. You might find the best way to do X in 2015, but perhaps that's worse than finding nothing.
Half the answers are for rails 2.0 and the other half tell you to just “install this gem” which monkey patches some part of the framework that has long since been deprecated/removed
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Hm, not sure I agree with you about SO. The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. That's a pretty great experience, and I certainly wouldn't say that it misses the bar to be a 'quality platform'. I do agree the moderation is overbearing at times, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwate…
The problem with SO is that obsolete answers are never marked as such. You might find the best way to do X in 2015, but perhaps that's worse than finding nothing.