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> the screenshot will always get through Dubious. Cloudflare and friends promote a culture of demonizing bots. For this to work you'd need to put as much energ

> the screenshot will always get through Dubious. Cloudflare and friends promote a culture of demonizing bots. For this to work you'd need to put as much energy into pretending to be a human as parsing the screenshot. At least with a dedicated API you declare that you aren't hostile to a user who wants to use the website on their own terms.

pjc50 4y ago
> Cloudflare and friends promote a culture of demonizing bots What does this mean? Usually it's the website owners who are hostile to scraping for commercial reasons, or simply bandwidth, to which Cloudflare is the solution; it's not some prejudice which has to be marketed to people.
- afandian 4y ago
  Here's one example of Cloudflare marketing. https://www.bigmarker.com/innovatus-digital/The-newest-approach-Stopping-bots-without-CAPTCHAs https://www.bigmarker.com/innovatus-digital/The-newest-appro... > We know a third of web traffic comes from bots with their insatiable appetite for attacks. From credential stuffing, to stealing inventory, to price and content scraping, stopping bots is critical to a strong web experience for customers that is not undermined by bots. This seems like classic demonizing tactics to me. Generalizing a whole class of users as an out-group, associating them with negative behaviour, painting them as criminals.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    > Generalizing a whole class of users as an out-group, associating them with negative behaviour Isn't this the reverse: the only criterion for this "out group" is behavior. Specifically that some people use a large number of automated clients to engage in behavior which the site owner regards (rightly or wrongly) as harmful. I can see that you're trying to draw racism analogies but that's not going to work. And ("stealing inventory") sometimes this is at the expense of other customers, who might want to buy at the RRP from the official website rather than have to go through scalpers.
    - afandian 4y ago
      Then talk about 'scalpers' or 'scammers'. Not 'bots'.
  - koprulusector 4y ago
    They added explicit qualifiers to “bots” that make apparent they are referring to abuse, not “bots” in the more general sense, such as a search crawler/indexer. Do you disagree that credential stuffing, scalping, content-scraping (to build fake social media profiles, phish, and scam advertisers/consumers) are problems and that bots perform those activities? Your defensiveness doesn’t seem justified, to me, unless you’re using bots for those purposes.
    - afandian 4y ago
      This is marketing copy so I assume that the sentence was deliberately constructed. > We know a third of web traffic comes from bots with their insatiable appetite for attacks. I read that run-on "with their" as a universal quantifier. There are no bots in that sentence that do not have an insatiable appetite. They could have added that quantifier to indicate the subset of bots they refer to: > We know a third of web traffic comes from THOSE bots WITH AN insatiable appetite for attacks. or even, simpler: > We know a third of web traffic comes from bots with AN insatiable appetite for attacks That's how I read the grammar. Language can be slippery, and can be made slipperyer. If we read it different ways we read it different ways. To your question, of course those things are bad, and of course people use bots to do this. They also use web browsers and humans to do it. Some bots are bad. Some people are bad.

pjc50 4y ago

> Cloudflare and friends promote a culture of demonizing bots What does this mean? Usually it's the website owners who are hostile to scraping for commercial reasons, or simply bandwidth, to which Cloudflare is the solution; it's not some prejudice which has to be marketed to people.

afandian 4y ago
Here's one example of Cloudflare marketing. https://www.bigmarker.com/innovatus-digital/The-newest-approach-Stopping-bots-without-CAPTCHAs https://www.bigmarker.com/innovatus-digital/The-newest-appro... > We know a third of web traffic comes from bots with their insatiable appetite for attacks. From credential stuffing, to stealing inventory, to price and content scraping, stopping bots is critical to a strong web experience for customers that is not undermined by bots. This seems like classic demonizing tactics to me. Generalizing a whole class of users as an out-group, associating them with negative behaviour, painting them as criminals.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > Generalizing a whole class of users as an out-group, associating them with negative behaviour Isn't this the reverse: the only criterion for this "out group" is behavior. Specifically that some people use a large number of automated clients to engage in behavior which the site owner regards (rightly or wrongly) as harmful. I can see that you're trying to draw racism analogies but that's not going to work. And ("stealing inventory") sometimes this is at the expense of other customers, who might want to buy at the RRP from the official website rather than have to go through scalpers.
  - afandian 4y ago
    Then talk about 'scalpers' or 'scammers'. Not 'bots'.
- koprulusector 4y ago
  They added explicit qualifiers to “bots” that make apparent they are referring to abuse, not “bots” in the more general sense, such as a search crawler/indexer. Do you disagree that credential stuffing, scalping, content-scraping (to build fake social media profiles, phish, and scam advertisers/consumers) are problems and that bots perform those activities? Your defensiveness doesn’t seem justified, to me, unless you’re using bots for those purposes.
  - afandian 4y ago
    This is marketing copy so I assume that the sentence was deliberately constructed. > We know a third of web traffic comes from bots with their insatiable appetite for attacks. I read that run-on "with their" as a universal quantifier. There are no bots in that sentence that do not have an insatiable appetite. They could have added that quantifier to indicate the subset of bots they refer to: > We know a third of web traffic comes from THOSE bots WITH AN insatiable appetite for attacks. or even, simpler: > We know a third of web traffic comes from bots with AN insatiable appetite for attacks That's how I read the grammar. Language can be slippery, and can be made slipperyer. If we read it different ways we read it different ways. To your question, of course those things are bad, and of course people use bots to do this. They also use web browsers and humans to do it. Some bots are bad. Some people are bad.