Comment by shevy-java
8 hours ago
This does not work, for similar reasons why captchas piss off real humans.
You add a barrier here. You think that your solution means that AI is reduced, but you also reduce real humans. I noticed this with other parts too, such as "you need to verify your identity before you can post to the ruby issue tracker". I can do so, but I need my tablet and this takes me more time than before, so I stopped using the ruby issue tracker altogether. (It's not the only reason, but adding barriers really makes me invest my time elsewhere - more likely to do so at the least.)
You always need to consider all trade-offs. Charging money means you will also offset real humans at the same time. And it's not solely about the cost; it is simply a hassle to want to do so. For similar reasons I also rarely register at a phpbb forum - I need to store the password to not forget it etc... so more hassle. Using a password manager is also more of a hassle.
Yeah, I tried to sign up for instagram, but at the fourth captcha I gave up and left. How does instagram have any users with such a hostile sign-up barrier?
My profile picture is old enough to open an account on instagram
Fun fact. There is this threads twitter clone from meta. How do I login?
I "log in with Instagram", where "I log in with Facebook". Guess how well data recovery works when there is literally no password set. I'm surprised these systems work at all.
I can't access gnu.org, because their extreme measurements against the AI bots blocking my slightly older browser.
> Charging money means you will also offset real humans at the same time.
On completely different scales. Even if it not perfect, it is strong enough of a filter to turn a bot infestation into a mild annoyance.
That's an assumption. Depending on the incentives in play, the relative scale at which AI users and real humans are affected may well be the opposite of what you expect.
No, that's based on my experience running subscribers-only instances on the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix, Funkwhale) for more than 6 years now. I might not have that many users on the servers, but it's certainly a higher number than the zero spammers I ever got.
Metafilter and Something Awful both do this.
Both sites have survived and continue to work well for their users.
A small cost does definitely work for some sites.
Is SA still a thing? I had an account since... 2007? God I'm old. I miss the days when you could have a community that you could easily search for content. Nowadays everything is a discord black hole.