Comment by Nextgrid
7 months ago
> allows agents to act on behalf of registered users with economic incentives to control usage
There's a huge economy out there based on wasting human time. They explicitly do not want agents acting on behalf of humans, because it means human time is no longer being wasted.
They also don't want to get paid in money, because the money would go to a different profit center. The only payment they accept (because they use that as a metric to justify their salary) is "engagement" aka proof of wasted human time.
Nah. You misunderstood. "They" don't make money on human time wasted. They make money on ads served. They don't particularly care if the ads were served to humans or agents, they get paid either way. Bot-traffic is actually good for tech companies because it inflates numbers. Capthas are not there to waste our time, but are there to improve their credibility ("We are certain those ad-clicks were real humans because the captha said so").
Plenty of apps that don't have ads nevertheless chase "engagement" and will do everything possible to thwart automated/efficient usage.