This is a really good question we've thought a lot about

You're right that this kind of escalation is inevitable

a. From a business POV, we don't onboard any types of use-cases that we think go against the spirit of a good free web. I've had people ask if they could use our product to create Reddit voting or spamming rings and we didn't entertain it

b. From an open source POV, we prefer technologies like these be open source so website owners and other businesses can know what can happen, and decide how to approach it. Tools like selenium have existed for a long time -- largely to the benefit of the world!

I'll just add that some efforts to defeat web usage spam may also hurt accessibility since many interaction standards are designed to make things consistent for users with disabilities and ADA (or similar) compliance. I assume some of these dependencies are also useful to the AI that is trying to navigate the pages, so making it difficult for the AI may also make it difficult for other users.

20th birthday of the Selenium project will be this year! (October-ish)

> how do you prevent automated spam?

Manually accept new accounts on your service. That's what I do for my Fediverse server, and I never have to deal with spam on my local timeline :). Does it scale? No. Does everything need to scale? Also no.

I've had stuff like that turn me off from signing up or ever checking back.

Does it matter to you? Yes.

Will you admit it? No.

But yes, these are all decisions we need to make. That manually accepting is some serious dedication. Do you have kids?

If your target audience is businesses, not individuals, then you can go a very long way with fully manual onboarding, invoicing, etc. It's different for things like consumer services or e.g. forum users, but why couldn't you manually vet every business your business trades with?

> Does it matter to you? Yes.

> Will you admit it? No.

Are you trying to telling me my opinion? Because no, it does not matter to me. Your account would not be accepted because I don't know you.

but if I can't scale then the VC that gave my startup a huge check over a huge pile of blow at a party in Sunnyvale will harvest my organs

I am not aware of anyone really successfully, defeating spam at the moment.

I mod a 1 million+ Facebook group and they can’t even prevent someone from making 200 posts in a minute with the word “crypto” in it. The word list will flag it, but the spam filter won’t.

Reddit constantly has people messaging you in chat about “opportunities.”

Email is a disaster.

My personal blog has over 100,000 spam comments sitting in the filter so at least they were caught, but processing them is impossible.

I've heard of a lot of success sifting through email spam using custom gmail scripts + GPT-4. Kind of interesting that we can use LLMs to both create and detect spam to some degree of effectiveness

> I am not aware of anyone really successfully, defeating spam at the moment.

> I mod a 1 million+ Facebook group and they can’t even prevent someone from making 200 posts in a minute with the word “crypto” in it.

Could you possibly charge a nickel's worth of bitcoin to approve a post?

the only way to prevent spam is charge appropriate money, I don't see other solutions. Thats why many company use credit card to verify users. But, with virtual cards, they have some ability to spam, but not so much.

This.

If you charge enough, the spammers become valuable customers. Of course they tend to leave before that point, but you don't really care if they leave or stay; you make money either way.

Value for value.

I'm not good at finding fire hydrants either.