Comment by stephantul
1 hour ago
Because it destroys the economics of scraping. It’s too expensive with proof of work, or at least not as economically viable
1 hour ago
Because it destroys the economics of scraping. It’s too expensive with proof of work, or at least not as economically viable
Depends on what type of scraping you're trying to stop. For the dumb scrapers that would try to scrape every page on a git forge (for which there are a bazillion pages for a modest project, because of how the site works), yeah it might deter them enough to stop. For anything high value (eg. reddit comments or retail prices), 10s of cpu time isn't going to stop them.
It will not scare away bots but 10 seconds of wait (CPU or only a sleep) will turn away many real users. "This site is so slow, I'll use something else." A kind of reverse captcha.
Maybe, the proof of work can run in the background.