Re:I Fear for the Unauthenticated Web
by cwmma on Thursday March 20, 2025 @12:59PM
(#43425745)
this is basically what they are doing, but instead of charging actual money they are making visitors spin the CPU ideally in a proof of work problem, which has the same outcome from the crawlers perspective.
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This has existed for decades. The proof of CPU work is called "frontend frameworks"
I've talked with tons of publishers and all say the same thing:
"Hey, we'd happily give these companies clean data if they just paid us instead of building these scrapers."
I think there is a psychological aspect that made micropayments never work for humans but machines may be better suited for it.