this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
143 points (97.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43962 readers
1456 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- 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.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
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).
I was thinking the same thing about Google wanting their bots to be the only ones allowed to crawl and index the internet.
A bot that only reads your website is good, one that posts things or otherwise changes your database less so.
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.
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.