this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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There isn't a good way to classify human users with scripts without adding too much friction to normal use. Also bots are sometimes welcome amd useful, it's a problem when someone tries to mine data in large volume or effectively DoS the server.
Forget bots, there exist centers in India and other countries where you can employ humans to do 'automated things' (youtube like count, watch hour for example) at the same expense of bots. There are similar CAPTCHA services too. Good luck with those :)
Only rate limiting is the effective option.
i doubt that. you could maybe ratelimit per IP and the abusers will change their IP whenever needed. if you ratelimit the whole service over all users in the world, then your service dies as quickly into uselessness as effective your ratelimiter is. if you ratelimit actions of logged in users, then your ratelimiting is limited by your ability to identify fake or duplicate accounts, where captchas are not helpful at all.
i was answering about that wording (that captchas were "not" about bots but about "stopping automated requests") and that automated requests "are" bots instead.
call centers are neither bots nor automated requests (the opposite IS their advantage) and thus have no relation to what i was specifically saying in reply to that post that suggested automated requests and bots would be different things in this context.
i wasn't talking about effectiveness of captchas either or if bots should be banned or not, only about bots beeing automated requests (and vice versa) from the perspective of the platform stopping bots. and that trying to use different words for things, (claiming like "X isn't X, it is really U!"* or automated requests aren't bots) does not change the reality of the thing itself.
*) unrelated to any (a-)social media platform
yeah my bad. I meant too many automated requests. Both humans and bot generate spams and the issue is high influx of it. Legitimate users also use bots and by no means it's harmful. That way you do not encounter captcha everytime you visit any google page, nor a couple of scraping scripts gets a problem. Recaptcha (or hcaptcha, say) triggers when there is high volume of request coming from same ip. Instead of blocking everyone out to protect their servers, they might allow slower requests so legitimate users face mininimal hindrance.
Most google services nowadays require accounts with stronger (like cell phone) verification so automated spam isn't a big deal.
since bots are better at solving captchas and humanoid services exist that solve them, the only ones negatively affected by captchas are regular legitimate users. the bad guys use bots or services and are done. regular users have to endure while no security is added, and for the influx i guess it is much more like with the better lock on the front door: if your lock is a bit better than that of your neigbhour, theirs might be force-opened more likely than yours. it might help you, but its not a real but only relative and also very subjective feeling of 'security".
beeing slower than the wolves also isn't as bad as long as you are not the slowest in your group (some people say)... so doing a bit more than others always is a good choice (just better don't put that bar too low like using crowdsnakeoil for anything)
put in other words, common users can't easily become 'bad guy' ie cost of attack is higher hence lower number of script kiddies and automated attacks. You want to reduce number. These protections are nothing for bitnet owners or other high profile bad actors.
ps: recaptcha (or captcha in general) isn't a security feature. At most it can be a safety feature.
o,,O