this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
143 points (97.4% liked)

Asklemmy

43989 readers
634 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 88 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[โ€“] ramblinguy 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

While I can see the plus side of being able to identify bots, I don't think the WEI is the right way to do it, and Google definitely isn't the right company to be handling it

[โ€“] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Plus how do you spot the difference between a good bot and a bad bot? Web crawlers from search engines are for example inherently good, so they should still be able to operate, but if it is easy to register a good bot in WEI, it is also easy to register a bad bot. If it is hard to register a good bot, then you're effectively gatekeeping the automated part of the internet (something that actually might be Google's intention).

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

I was thinking the same thing about Google wanting their bots to be the only ones allowed to crawl and index the internet.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

A bot that only reads your website is good, one that posts things or otherwise changes your database less so.

[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, even if the hardware can validate perfectly that it's not running any botting software, there's nothing stopping someone from spinning up a farm of these machines and using a central server as a hypervisor for them all. It's impossible to determine if your user is a bot.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

It's impossible to determine if your user is a bot.

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[โ€“] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

I just wish everyone would switch to Firefox.

It is because Chrome has a monopoly, is close enough to monopoly.