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A comment on Proof-of-work to protect lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.org against AI crawlers. Parent comment

Re:Proof-of-work to protect lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.o... by klysm on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @06:51PM (#43562685)
> Paying fractions of a penny to view websites has minimal impact

Although true in an ideal financial sense, it's demonstrably false because having a pay wall of any kind will severely limit usage.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Proof-of-work to protect lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.o... by spelyytomat on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @07:16PM (#43562903)
The fractions of a penny are in compute resources. cock.li required proof of work (10 minutes on a phone browser) to register a new mailbox before it went down.
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Re:Proof-of-work to protect lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.o... by abetusk on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @07:05PM (#43562809)
Demonstrably false with a payment service like PayPal but could still be an option for some type of online payment. One can imagine a payment method that's transparent, integrated and seamless. Maybe something like limits can be set with features to allow, prompt or flat out deny websites that violate some payment policy.

My view is that when the payment threshold is so low, the issue is inconvenience or user friction, not the amount of money involved. I suspect people would be fine with small payments if the user experience was better. For example, Amazon, Netflix, iTunes or Spotify.

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