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Everything is going to get so much worse and AI really is to blame. So many websites now have these verification pauses and CAPTCHs because of AI agents. Part o

by jmyeet 6mo ago

Everything is going to get so much worse and AI really is to blame. So many websites now have these verification pauses and CAPTCHs because of AI agents. Part of it is agents. Part of it is everyone running their own awful versions of Googlebot. Years ago IIRC there was a "bug" where the Android emulator allowed you to create real Google accounts. This was found and I'm sure millions of these accounts were created. There's a whole black market for Google accounts. Whereas I lost a Google account I'd created for a relative because it hadn't been used in awhile and it was tied to a mobile number I no longer had. I don't see how this ends without registering for a service like Gmail being tied to your government ID.

hedora 6mo ago
I don't understand the anti-agent blocks. What exactly is the problem if an AI agent reads your website and summarizes it for me? If it is bandwidth, why not spend the effort making a screen-reader friendly version of the site, and somehow shunt agents to that (saving 99% of the cost of serving the page)? (I run an ad blocker, so the ads will not be displayed either way, but I see more agent blockers on ad free sites than ad supported ones anyway.)
- jmyeet 6mo ago
  Because people do things like this. They spin up OpenClaw and ask it "find me a computer with an RTX 5070Ti or 5080 that's in stock within 50 miles of me that I can go and pick up today". So now the agent is crawling bestbuy.com, walmart.com, etc looking for PCs. I don't run one of these sites but I would bet the traffic looks a lot like a Web crawler and is incredibly resource-wasteful. If you were at the screen you might go and start searching for "5080" or you might go into Computers and start filtering. People just don't care if an automated agent is wasting someone else's resources. Also, where's the ad revenue in an agent crawling your site? It's just going to be an arms race like adblockers and CAPTCHA but it's going to be so much worse for real people who want to do anything.

by jmyeet 6mo ago

hedora 6mo ago

I don't understand the anti-agent blocks. What exactly is the problem if an AI agent reads your website and summarizes it for me? If it is bandwidth, why not spend the effort making a screen-reader friendly version of the site, and somehow shunt agents to that (saving 99% of the cost of serving the page)? (I run an ad blocker, so the ads will not be displayed either way, but I see more agent blockers on ad free sites than ad supported ones anyway.)

jmyeet 6mo ago
Because people do things like this. They spin up OpenClaw and ask it "find me a computer with an RTX 5070Ti or 5080 that's in stock within 50 miles of me that I can go and pick up today". So now the agent is crawling bestbuy.com, walmart.com, etc looking for PCs. I don't run one of these sites but I would bet the traffic looks a lot like a Web crawler and is incredibly resource-wasteful. If you were at the screen you might go and start searching for "5080" or you might go into Computers and start filtering. People just don't care if an automated agent is wasting someone else's resources. Also, where's the ad revenue in an agent crawling your site? It's just going to be an arms race like adblockers and CAPTCHA but it's going to be so much worse for real people who want to do anything.