6 ms·

The problem is what is the alternative? I'm (not) defending them or this practice by any measure, but we all know what happens if you just open your site up wit

by ethin 4mo ago

The problem is what is the alternative? I'm (not) defending them or this practice by any measure, but we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system. I've hated CAPTCHAs ever since I first encountered them and I can't wait for them to just finally die a permanent death, but I also don't know how we solve the "how do you identify a human and a bot" in a way which doesn't require server admins to have extremely beefy servers or similar setups to handle the extra load. I'm not going to do the "there HAS to be a way thing" either because, for all I know, this could just be one of those impossible-to-solve problems.

jwr 4mo ago
> we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system No, we don't know. I honestly do not understand the problem. I run websites, both static and non-static. Granted, my sites aren't exactly the most popular internet go-to destinations, but I should be seeing this DDoS too, right? I do see lots of requests. Nothing that any modern system can't handle. Computers are stupid fast these days. Unless you are doing something unreasonable, it's really hard to even notice this "extra load". I understand there are sites for whom this causes problems, but I think these are rare and could be optimized not to do unreasonable things. I think too many people are annoyed by AI companies (arguably understandable position), look at their logs and speak of "hammering", "DDoS" and "extra load", while in reality it doesn't matter much.
- ethin 4mo ago
  Has anyone pointed an AI scraper at your server at all? Unless your website appears in search engine listings I don't think the AI scrapers will slam it. My server has never been hit by them but my server is also practically unknown. All of this said, I'm not going to claim that server loads can handle it because many sysadmins have claimed otherwise, and I would like to think that their claims are reliable.
  - redox99 4mo ago
    As soon as you get your TLS certificate you get bombarded with scraping. You don't need someone to "point a scraper at you". What matters most is usually how much there is to scrape. If you have like 5 pages that's nothing. For forum like websites where each thread, each user profile, etc. gets scraped that's when traffic increases. I just let them have at it with no issues though, computers are fast.
    - ethin 4mo ago
      That's really weird. My experience is quite different: I have several subdomains and all of them have TLS certs and I haven't (yet) seen this (thankfully). Either that, or my server is masking it. The weird thing is that my server is an OVH dedicated box that doesn't exactly have top-tier specs, so I have no idea what's going on there. Very weird indeed.
      - redox99 4mo ago
        Probably you don't have much to scrape?
        ethin 4mo ago
        I mean... It may be that most of the things I run aren't really scrape-able. I run Matrix (which requires authentication), an XWiki instance, Zulip, Terraria, Forgejo, Nextcloud, a Mastodon server... Most of those require auth behind my Kanidm instance to actually do anything. Well and most of them have APIs that are much better than "scrape the universe".
    - GoblinSlayer 4mo ago
      If you run the site on a custom port, scrapers won't find it?
  - userbinator 4mo ago
    Also, how do we even know they're really "AI scrapers", or just a deliberate DDoS to push sites into using CF or other "anti-bot" providers?
- redox99 4mo ago
  You get downvoted for these opinions but I agree. Most people that complain that their servers get hammered by AI bots are those that run very unoptimized servers that can only handle like 100 rps. I've never had any issues with any of my moderately optimized websites. A $10 VPS can handle sooo much traffic.
  - CodeBytes 4mo ago
    I think people get annoyed when it's suggested they spend time optimising or even re-writing their websites to handle high traffic loads just to cater to AI bots ripping their content. It's also not always easy to do. I run a small wiki which is fairly optimised, nearly every page manages at least ~3k rps on a small VPS. The only exception is the diff page which is ~150 rps. Optimising that while still giving good output isn't that easy, but the wiki doesn't have many users so that would be fine if it wasn't for the AI bots. The AI bots ignore robots.txt and were initially hitting the site with ~1k rps crawling every combination. Even that would be manageable as there's currently ~150,000 combinations, except they kept re-crawling the whole lot each day. The server could manage it but it was a massive waste of resources. They were using residential IPs and only sending 1 request from each IP making it impossible to block. In the end I gave up and put a Cloudflare challenge in front of it. I don't want to use Cloudflare but the alternative is forcing users to login to view diffs or remove them entirely.
    - canyp 4mo ago
      Curious, but how do the bots figure out the combinations? Or do you have links to the diffs from other sites? I assume the diff takes two files in query parameters or something.
      - CodeBytes 4mo ago
        I'm not 100% sure but I think links. There's a bunch on the history and revision pages. Yeah, the diff URL has two revision ID's as parameters. I did try removing some of the links without success. I guess once they have them they just keep checking.
    - 4mo ago
- dr_um 4mo ago
  A small, single EU country focused non-static e-commerce, with proper robots.txt instructions that worked perfectly well in the search & co bots -only "era" with rate limiting for nginx/php-fpm setup - is kinda struggling without CF to handle 15000 requests per 15 minutes, coming from Chrome "users" from IPv6. Best so far was an avg. server load in htop = 40 on an 8-core server x_x
  - PunchyHamster 4mo ago
    > handle 15000 requests per 15 minutes, that's just ~17 req/sec That's "cheap VPS running wordpress" level of traffic
    - BenjiWiebe 4mo ago
      Maybe a plain WordPress install. Run something like WooCommerce and install a bunch of plugins to get the functionality that WordPress and WooCommerce should have built-in, and suddenly a cheap VPS can only handle 2 or 3 requests per second. It's phenomenal how inefficient the WordPress/WooCommerce stack is. Though the main issue I'm seeing is credit card testing, not scraping. And I'm ideologically opposed to using a CDN (because it shouldn't be needed for such a small site!) so it's somewhat a self-inflicted problem...
      - PunchyHamster 4mo ago
        "Security" plugins are also HUGE problem here, most of them turns "few cached DB SELECTs" (or static file read if you use caching plugin) into now a bunch of inserts, just to log/analyze "offender" IP and maybe block it, in many cases turning "blocking offender" to be more costly that would be serving the page without the security plugin
  - canyp 4mo ago
    Block out IPv6 and see if that helps.
    - lxgr 4mo ago
- matt_heimer 4mo ago
  It might depend on the tech stack. I run a small niche website but it has PHP and a database (MediaWiki/PHPBB) and without Cloudflare I'd estimate I'd need to spend several hundred dollars a month to handle the traffic. Traffic used to be tens of thousands of requests a day. AI has increased that to between 400k and 3M requests per day but it's not a smooth distribution. This is with bot fight mode on that greatly reduces traffic. I adopted Cloudflare because it was getting DDoSed by the AI crawlers. I'm pretty sure all of them are vibe coding their crawlers and don't bother adding rate limiting as a requirement.
  - jwr 4mo ago
    That was my point. I was trying to be gentle by mentioning "unreasonable" things, but seriously — how did we get to the point where less than 6 requests per second (that's 500k requests per day) is considered a DDoS? I've spent some effort on optimizing my sites, but most of the effort was focused on avoiding unreasonable (stupid) work. Do I need a session for every request? No, I don't! Do I need a database fetch for every access to my homepage? No, I don't! Is it a problem to actually load all of my static content in all supported languages (24) into memory and serve it from memory? No, it isn't! I use Clojure behind nginx on the server for my sites. Oh, and I also pre-compress all static assets to Brotli, so anything that handles brotli gets a static file served directly from nginx. I also use immutable assets with unlimited caching semantics. Really — the problem is that we've grown lax and our software has become bloated, slow, and with unreasonable code paths. If every page fetch does 12 database accesses and runs through a slow interpreter, that is surely going to be a problem.
    - matt_heimer 4mo ago
      That's the traffic after rate limiting controls and bot fight mode. It's 3-4 million requests per day without bot fight mode and just rate limits. And as I said it's not a smooth distribution. Plus the requests are almost never for pages in cache. It's always stuff like loading all the message threads from the year 2000 or loading up the details of every page edit ever made to a wiki page. If it was more static content it'd be easier, it's really the db being a bottle neck in a dynamic site. Yes, the software could be better optimized but then I'd have to own the development of it. There is no reason a niche website should be getting millions of requests per day.
- canyp 4mo ago
  I second this. My website exposes a cgit and 99% of the traffic now is AI scraping the sources, but the load is nowhere near DoS territory. And this is running on the cheapest VPS I could find. Not saying I'm not annoyed by the scraping; I am looking to block them, but I'm also not going to put the site behind the gatekeeper. If anything, Cloudflare must love AI scraping now for the same reason AV companies love malware. Now, if you are running a PHP stack...yeah, maybe that's the problem right there.
  - lxgr 4mo ago
    Is there actually any plausible theory why "AI" would repeatedly scrape the same sites? Are there that many competing, completely independent AI labs? Is it cheaper to repeatedly scrape than to buffer the scraped data locally? (I find it very hard to imagine that it's easier to deal with changing/disappearing content than it is to stand up such a cache.)
    - jack_pp 4mo ago
      If you ask an agent to check sources / function definitions of open source packages it will wget / curl it
    - GoblinSlayer 4mo ago
      It's an AI generated scraper that scrapes nonstop.
  - account42 4mo ago
    The PHP stack isn't even the problem, it's having unauthenticated requests getting past the cache in the first place, something that most sites should be able to prevent.
  - ern_ave 4mo ago
    > 99% of the traffic now is AI scraping the sources I wonder if we should stop fighting this and instead create an API specifically for this purpose? Or, a central repository that you could send your data to and say to anyone wanting to scrape, "safe yourself some time and just get my data from this other place"
- acdha 4mo ago
  We do know, just ask anyone who runs a more popular site or does anything where abuse can be monetized (shopping, reviews, etc.). Avoiding that due to obscurity isn’t an answer because it’s saying you’re safe until something, possibly outside of your control, causes the bots to descend and give you an extra 500M requests with no chance of revenue. I’m with OP: I don’t like this but the alternatives all look like the death of the open web.
  - handoflixue 4mo ago
    > just ask anyone who runs a more popular site The person you're responding to already said they ran a modestly sized site. What actual scale opens one up to abuse? If only the top 1% of sites need it, then it seems silly to say "everyone" needs it.
    - daishi55 4mo ago
      So everyone is paying cloudflare… why?
      - fragmede 4mo ago
        Most likely not. Their free tier is fairly generous.
      - tardedmeme 4mo ago
        Because paying with MITM is far less visible than paying with money
      - LgWoodenBadger 4mo ago
        Because charging for bandwidth/traffic is still a thing, unfortunately
    - ceejayoz 4mo ago
      It’s not just scale. Do you accept user generated content? If so, more of a target.
- piker 4mo ago
  Same. Tritium and the blog have done stents on the front page here and high traffic subreddits and that plus bots has never been a problem. UX could be improved through a CDN but even that isn’t worth the trade-off for us at the moment.
- JohnTHaller 4mo ago
  If you're in any way semi-popular and a decent size, you're gonna get hammered. PortableApps.com was partially offline for weeks due to China-based AI scrapers. You block the useragent, they start hitting you with another one from the same IP in the same way. You block the IP, they switch to another. You block the subnet, they use another. At one point it was nearly a thousand different IPs from around China hammering away. For all intents and purposes, a DDoS. This wasn't a little "extra load", this was load that was thousands of times beyond what our legitimate userbase was using. And if you're thinking about blocking all of China, while this particular AI bot didn't use them, a bunch of other ones I've encountered use VPNs and hacked clients worldwide.
- RHSeeger 4mo ago
  > I understand there are sites for whom this causes problems, but I think these are rare and could be optimized not to do unreasonable things. There are. They're not. They can't (without significant effort)
- hombre_fatal 4mo ago
  Consider yourself lucky. But don't let yourself fall into the trap of thinking it's a nonissue for everyone else until it happens to you. People shouldn't have to be experts or provision a larger server to run a UGC service that can withstand the sort of 30x more traffic I'm seeing from AI bots. Or rather, you didn't render the argument for why they should have to do that if they can just use CloudFlare's free tier. Either way, it's easy to have all the answers when you've never had the problem.
xg15 4mo ago
I don't think it's just privacy, it also increasingly turns the web itself into a walled garden. The end result is that websites can only ever be accessed by "approved" clients - the latest Chrome, Edge, Safari and if you're lucky Firefox - and nothing else.
- robertlagrant 4mo ago
  > and if you're lucky Firefox I haven't had any problems with Firefox so far. Why do you say this?
  - xg15 4mo ago
    That was more a (gloomy) outlook into the future, given Chrome's market dominance and tendency for unilateral actions in web standards.
    - robertlagrant 4mo ago
      I haven't ever noticed Cloudflare having any issues on Firefox, so presumably that implies any unilateral actions in web standards have been worked around by CF to provide the service to Firefox as well.
      - amatecha 4mo ago
        I'm pretty frequently blocked by Cloudflare when I use Firefox on OpenBSD -- apparently it's too suspicious of a combination for their liking, or something. Even on Linux I've occasionally had issues. I've had to email site operators to ask them to change their configuration so I can actually be a customer of their business.
        robertlagrant 4mo ago
        Oh dear. That is tricky. It must be a rare enough combination that it looks like automation.
  - 4mo ago
steelframe 4mo ago
The most plausible near-term path is probably micropayments embedded invisibly in AI agents. Your agent that has learned what you value and can make a reasonable decision to allow a micropayment for certain content pays on your behalf without requiring a conscious decision each time, eliminating the mental transaction cost problem entirely. It's the mental transaction cost that arguably led to the failure of the micro payment model back in the early 2000s. Although the cynical part of me says that this will result in malicious actors trying to trick agents into giving out a bunch of micro payments. There are counter defenses that can help detect and compensate for that, but perhaps the best we will be able to do is prompt user with the default agent recommendation.
PunchyHamster 4mo ago
We have few dozen websites, from ones doing single digit Mbit to few Gbits. Never needed it. Just put the worst offenders in penalty bucket and that's usually enough
- cindyllm 4mo ago
  [dead]
adgjlsfhk1 4mo ago
I think there's some chance we get a "proof of purchase" system where there is some entity that takes a $10 payment to give out a unique identity token that you need to present to visit most sites. if you have a revocation process for ones used for bad actors, it seems like it would work pretty well.
- patrakov 4mo ago
  Except if your country is under sanctions.
- tardedmeme 4mo ago
  That's called an IP address. You pay your ISP $50+ every month to get one. Has it worked so far?
  - BenjiWiebe 4mo ago
    If the bad guys also had to pay $50/month/IP it would probably work. The bad guys don't pay that much. And sometimes the bad guys actually use the IPs of other people (botnets on residential IPs) and don't pay anything at all.
    - tardedmeme 4mo ago
      They pay something. You can get a few ten cents per gigabyte for a voluntary proxy right now. I've never tried it long enough to get a minimum payout, so could be a scam for all I know (or maybe the minimum payout is the scam). What would stop you offering someone a few tens of cents per GB to borrow any other token barrier you put up?
codedokode 4mo ago
> AI bots which hammer servers You can easily calculate which IPs/networks bots are using by looking at where most traffic comes from and who requests lot of pages with non-human speed.
- AlexeyBelov 4mo ago
  Each IP address is either from a residential proxy network, or from AWS / GCP / DigitalOcean. And each IP requests at human speed. 1000 of them are an issue though.
  - codedokode 4mo ago
    If you aggregate over a day, it might become more obvious. Also, datacenter network is a big red flag. By the way, what's your opinion about running a cryptominer on requests from datacenter and bot IPs?
arrty88 4mo ago
I use CF and i don’t enable these anti bot measures. It’s up to the web master
Unit327 4mo ago
Anubis is one alternative, kinda sucks that we need to slow down the web for everyone a little bit though.
hem777 4mo ago
The alternative is not have that one choke point that can be hammered. Decentralize.
account42 4mo ago
> we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system So delegalize it. Strip searching everyone to paper over the fact that the societal contract has been broken only delays that.

by ethin 4mo ago

jwr 4mo ago

> we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system No, we don't know. I honestly do not understand the problem. I run websites, both static and non-static. Granted, my sites aren't exactly the most popular internet go-to destinations, but I should be seeing this DDoS too, right? I do see lots of requests. Nothing that any modern system can't handle. Computers are stupid fast these days. Unless you are doing something unreasonable, it's really hard to even notice this "extra load". I understand there are sites for whom this causes problems, but I think these are rare and could be optimized not to do unreasonable things. I think too many people are annoyed by AI companies (arguably understandable position), look at their logs and speak of "hammering", "DDoS" and "extra load", while in reality it doesn't matter much.

ethin 4mo ago
Has anyone pointed an AI scraper at your server at all? Unless your website appears in search engine listings I don't think the AI scrapers will slam it. My server has never been hit by them but my server is also practically unknown. All of this said, I'm not going to claim that server loads can handle it because many sysadmins have claimed otherwise, and I would like to think that their claims are reliable.
- redox99 4mo ago
  As soon as you get your TLS certificate you get bombarded with scraping. You don't need someone to "point a scraper at you". What matters most is usually how much there is to scrape. If you have like 5 pages that's nothing. For forum like websites where each thread, each user profile, etc. gets scraped that's when traffic increases. I just let them have at it with no issues though, computers are fast.
  - ethin 4mo ago
    That's really weird. My experience is quite different: I have several subdomains and all of them have TLS certs and I haven't (yet) seen this (thankfully). Either that, or my server is masking it. The weird thing is that my server is an OVH dedicated box that doesn't exactly have top-tier specs, so I have no idea what's going on there. Very weird indeed.
    - redox99 4mo ago
      Probably you don't have much to scrape?
      - ethin 4mo ago
        I mean... It may be that most of the things I run aren't really scrape-able. I run Matrix (which requires authentication), an XWiki instance, Zulip, Terraria, Forgejo, Nextcloud, a Mastodon server... Most of those require auth behind my Kanidm instance to actually do anything. Well and most of them have APIs that are much better than "scrape the universe".
  - GoblinSlayer 4mo ago
    If you run the site on a custom port, scrapers won't find it?
- userbinator 4mo ago
  Also, how do we even know they're really "AI scrapers", or just a deliberate DDoS to push sites into using CF or other "anti-bot" providers?
redox99 4mo ago
You get downvoted for these opinions but I agree. Most people that complain that their servers get hammered by AI bots are those that run very unoptimized servers that can only handle like 100 rps. I've never had any issues with any of my moderately optimized websites. A $10 VPS can handle sooo much traffic.
- CodeBytes 4mo ago
  I think people get annoyed when it's suggested they spend time optimising or even re-writing their websites to handle high traffic loads just to cater to AI bots ripping their content. It's also not always easy to do. I run a small wiki which is fairly optimised, nearly every page manages at least ~3k rps on a small VPS. The only exception is the diff page which is ~150 rps. Optimising that while still giving good output isn't that easy, but the wiki doesn't have many users so that would be fine if it wasn't for the AI bots. The AI bots ignore robots.txt and were initially hitting the site with ~1k rps crawling every combination. Even that would be manageable as there's currently ~150,000 combinations, except they kept re-crawling the whole lot each day. The server could manage it but it was a massive waste of resources. They were using residential IPs and only sending 1 request from each IP making it impossible to block. In the end I gave up and put a Cloudflare challenge in front of it. I don't want to use Cloudflare but the alternative is forcing users to login to view diffs or remove them entirely.
  - canyp 4mo ago
    Curious, but how do the bots figure out the combinations? Or do you have links to the diffs from other sites? I assume the diff takes two files in query parameters or something.
    - CodeBytes 4mo ago
      I'm not 100% sure but I think links. There's a bunch on the history and revision pages. Yeah, the diff URL has two revision ID's as parameters. I did try removing some of the links without success. I guess once they have them they just keep checking.
  - 4mo ago
dr_um 4mo ago
A small, single EU country focused non-static e-commerce, with proper robots.txt instructions that worked perfectly well in the search & co bots -only "era" with rate limiting for nginx/php-fpm setup - is kinda struggling without CF to handle 15000 requests per 15 minutes, coming from Chrome "users" from IPv6. Best so far was an avg. server load in htop = 40 on an 8-core server x_x
- PunchyHamster 4mo ago
  > handle 15000 requests per 15 minutes, that's just ~17 req/sec That's "cheap VPS running wordpress" level of traffic
  - BenjiWiebe 4mo ago
    Maybe a plain WordPress install. Run something like WooCommerce and install a bunch of plugins to get the functionality that WordPress and WooCommerce should have built-in, and suddenly a cheap VPS can only handle 2 or 3 requests per second. It's phenomenal how inefficient the WordPress/WooCommerce stack is. Though the main issue I'm seeing is credit card testing, not scraping. And I'm ideologically opposed to using a CDN (because it shouldn't be needed for such a small site!) so it's somewhat a self-inflicted problem...
    - PunchyHamster 4mo ago
      "Security" plugins are also HUGE problem here, most of them turns "few cached DB SELECTs" (or static file read if you use caching plugin) into now a bunch of inserts, just to log/analyze "offender" IP and maybe block it, in many cases turning "blocking offender" to be more costly that would be serving the page without the security plugin
- canyp 4mo ago
  Block out IPv6 and see if that helps.
  - lxgr 4mo ago
matt_heimer 4mo ago
It might depend on the tech stack. I run a small niche website but it has PHP and a database (MediaWiki/PHPBB) and without Cloudflare I'd estimate I'd need to spend several hundred dollars a month to handle the traffic. Traffic used to be tens of thousands of requests a day. AI has increased that to between 400k and 3M requests per day but it's not a smooth distribution. This is with bot fight mode on that greatly reduces traffic. I adopted Cloudflare because it was getting DDoSed by the AI crawlers. I'm pretty sure all of them are vibe coding their crawlers and don't bother adding rate limiting as a requirement.
- jwr 4mo ago
  That was my point. I was trying to be gentle by mentioning "unreasonable" things, but seriously — how did we get to the point where less than 6 requests per second (that's 500k requests per day) is considered a DDoS? I've spent some effort on optimizing my sites, but most of the effort was focused on avoiding unreasonable (stupid) work. Do I need a session for every request? No, I don't! Do I need a database fetch for every access to my homepage? No, I don't! Is it a problem to actually load all of my static content in all supported languages (24) into memory and serve it from memory? No, it isn't! I use Clojure behind nginx on the server for my sites. Oh, and I also pre-compress all static assets to Brotli, so anything that handles brotli gets a static file served directly from nginx. I also use immutable assets with unlimited caching semantics. Really — the problem is that we've grown lax and our software has become bloated, slow, and with unreasonable code paths. If every page fetch does 12 database accesses and runs through a slow interpreter, that is surely going to be a problem.
  - matt_heimer 4mo ago
    That's the traffic after rate limiting controls and bot fight mode. It's 3-4 million requests per day without bot fight mode and just rate limits. And as I said it's not a smooth distribution. Plus the requests are almost never for pages in cache. It's always stuff like loading all the message threads from the year 2000 or loading up the details of every page edit ever made to a wiki page. If it was more static content it'd be easier, it's really the db being a bottle neck in a dynamic site. Yes, the software could be better optimized but then I'd have to own the development of it. There is no reason a niche website should be getting millions of requests per day.
canyp 4mo ago
I second this. My website exposes a cgit and 99% of the traffic now is AI scraping the sources, but the load is nowhere near DoS territory. And this is running on the cheapest VPS I could find. Not saying I'm not annoyed by the scraping; I am looking to block them, but I'm also not going to put the site behind the gatekeeper. If anything, Cloudflare must love AI scraping now for the same reason AV companies love malware. Now, if you are running a PHP stack...yeah, maybe that's the problem right there.
- lxgr 4mo ago
  Is there actually any plausible theory why "AI" would repeatedly scrape the same sites? Are there that many competing, completely independent AI labs? Is it cheaper to repeatedly scrape than to buffer the scraped data locally? (I find it very hard to imagine that it's easier to deal with changing/disappearing content than it is to stand up such a cache.)
  - jack_pp 4mo ago
    If you ask an agent to check sources / function definitions of open source packages it will wget / curl it
  - GoblinSlayer 4mo ago
    It's an AI generated scraper that scrapes nonstop.
- account42 4mo ago
  The PHP stack isn't even the problem, it's having unauthenticated requests getting past the cache in the first place, something that most sites should be able to prevent.
- ern_ave 4mo ago
  > 99% of the traffic now is AI scraping the sources I wonder if we should stop fighting this and instead create an API specifically for this purpose? Or, a central repository that you could send your data to and say to anyone wanting to scrape, "safe yourself some time and just get my data from this other place"
acdha 4mo ago
We do know, just ask anyone who runs a more popular site or does anything where abuse can be monetized (shopping, reviews, etc.). Avoiding that due to obscurity isn’t an answer because it’s saying you’re safe until something, possibly outside of your control, causes the bots to descend and give you an extra 500M requests with no chance of revenue. I’m with OP: I don’t like this but the alternatives all look like the death of the open web.
- handoflixue 4mo ago
  > just ask anyone who runs a more popular site The person you're responding to already said they ran a modestly sized site. What actual scale opens one up to abuse? If only the top 1% of sites need it, then it seems silly to say "everyone" needs it.
  - daishi55 4mo ago
    So everyone is paying cloudflare… why?
    - fragmede 4mo ago
      Most likely not. Their free tier is fairly generous.
    - tardedmeme 4mo ago
      Because paying with MITM is far less visible than paying with money
    - LgWoodenBadger 4mo ago
      Because charging for bandwidth/traffic is still a thing, unfortunately
  - ceejayoz 4mo ago
    It’s not just scale. Do you accept user generated content? If so, more of a target.
piker 4mo ago
Same. Tritium and the blog have done stents on the front page here and high traffic subreddits and that plus bots has never been a problem. UX could be improved through a CDN but even that isn’t worth the trade-off for us at the moment.
JohnTHaller 4mo ago
If you're in any way semi-popular and a decent size, you're gonna get hammered. PortableApps.com was partially offline for weeks due to China-based AI scrapers. You block the useragent, they start hitting you with another one from the same IP in the same way. You block the IP, they switch to another. You block the subnet, they use another. At one point it was nearly a thousand different IPs from around China hammering away. For all intents and purposes, a DDoS. This wasn't a little "extra load", this was load that was thousands of times beyond what our legitimate userbase was using. And if you're thinking about blocking all of China, while this particular AI bot didn't use them, a bunch of other ones I've encountered use VPNs and hacked clients worldwide.
RHSeeger 4mo ago
> I understand there are sites for whom this causes problems, but I think these are rare and could be optimized not to do unreasonable things. There are. They're not. They can't (without significant effort)
hombre_fatal 4mo ago
Consider yourself lucky. But don't let yourself fall into the trap of thinking it's a nonissue for everyone else until it happens to you. People shouldn't have to be experts or provision a larger server to run a UGC service that can withstand the sort of 30x more traffic I'm seeing from AI bots. Or rather, you didn't render the argument for why they should have to do that if they can just use CloudFlare's free tier. Either way, it's easy to have all the answers when you've never had the problem.

xg15 4mo ago

I don't think it's just privacy, it also increasingly turns the web itself into a walled garden. The end result is that websites can only ever be accessed by "approved" clients - the latest Chrome, Edge, Safari and if you're lucky Firefox - and nothing else.

robertlagrant 4mo ago
> and if you're lucky Firefox I haven't had any problems with Firefox so far. Why do you say this?
- xg15 4mo ago
  That was more a (gloomy) outlook into the future, given Chrome's market dominance and tendency for unilateral actions in web standards.
  - robertlagrant 4mo ago
    I haven't ever noticed Cloudflare having any issues on Firefox, so presumably that implies any unilateral actions in web standards have been worked around by CF to provide the service to Firefox as well.
    - amatecha 4mo ago
      I'm pretty frequently blocked by Cloudflare when I use Firefox on OpenBSD -- apparently it's too suspicious of a combination for their liking, or something. Even on Linux I've occasionally had issues. I've had to email site operators to ask them to change their configuration so I can actually be a customer of their business.
      - robertlagrant 4mo ago
        Oh dear. That is tricky. It must be a rare enough combination that it looks like automation.
- 4mo ago

steelframe 4mo ago

The most plausible near-term path is probably micropayments embedded invisibly in AI agents. Your agent that has learned what you value and can make a reasonable decision to allow a micropayment for certain content pays on your behalf without requiring a conscious decision each time, eliminating the mental transaction cost problem entirely. It's the mental transaction cost that arguably led to the failure of the micro payment model back in the early 2000s. Although the cynical part of me says that this will result in malicious actors trying to trick agents into giving out a bunch of micro payments. There are counter defenses that can help detect and compensate for that, but perhaps the best we will be able to do is prompt user with the default agent recommendation.

PunchyHamster 4mo ago

We have few dozen websites, from ones doing single digit Mbit to few Gbits. Never needed it. Just put the worst offenders in penalty bucket and that's usually enough

cindyllm 4mo ago
[dead]

adgjlsfhk1 4mo ago

I think there's some chance we get a "proof of purchase" system where there is some entity that takes a $10 payment to give out a unique identity token that you need to present to visit most sites. if you have a revocation process for ones used for bad actors, it seems like it would work pretty well.

patrakov 4mo ago
Except if your country is under sanctions.
tardedmeme 4mo ago
That's called an IP address. You pay your ISP $50+ every month to get one. Has it worked so far?
- BenjiWiebe 4mo ago
  If the bad guys also had to pay $50/month/IP it would probably work. The bad guys don't pay that much. And sometimes the bad guys actually use the IPs of other people (botnets on residential IPs) and don't pay anything at all.
  - tardedmeme 4mo ago
    They pay something. You can get a few ten cents per gigabyte for a voluntary proxy right now. I've never tried it long enough to get a minimum payout, so could be a scam for all I know (or maybe the minimum payout is the scam). What would stop you offering someone a few tens of cents per GB to borrow any other token barrier you put up?

codedokode 4mo ago

> AI bots which hammer servers You can easily calculate which IPs/networks bots are using by looking at where most traffic comes from and who requests lot of pages with non-human speed.

AlexeyBelov 4mo ago
Each IP address is either from a residential proxy network, or from AWS / GCP / DigitalOcean. And each IP requests at human speed. 1000 of them are an issue though.
- codedokode 4mo ago
  If you aggregate over a day, it might become more obvious. Also, datacenter network is a big red flag. By the way, what's your opinion about running a cryptominer on requests from datacenter and bot IPs?

arrty88 4mo ago

I use CF and i don’t enable these anti bot measures. It’s up to the web master

Unit327 4mo ago

Anubis is one alternative, kinda sucks that we need to slow down the web for everyone a little bit though.

hem777 4mo ago

The alternative is not have that one choke point that can be hammered. Decentralize.

account42 4mo ago

> we all know what happens if you just open your site up without these, especially with AI bots which hammer servers and are in effect a legalized DDoS system So delegalize it. Strip searching everyone to paper over the fact that the societal contract has been broken only delays that.