I completely disagree. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. What he proposes is just another flavor of technofascism, control disguised as ethics. These so-called humane scraping barriers will end up blocking humans, not machines. We have seen this before with CAPTCHAs, reCAPTCHAs, and all those “human verification” gimmicks, always bypassed by bots and always annoying to real people. Personally, I have nothing against crawlers and bots; they should do their shady jobs. Trying to wall yourself off is just meh. And those fancy licenses or “ethical use” terms won’t change anything either. The web is not the United States, and nobody really cares about someone’s imaginary social contracts. Maybe it’s time to accept a simple fact: once something goes on the web, it becomes public territory, and no one can still pretend to control the flow of information.
Fortunately this quixotic proposal is just some guy’s blog post.
There’s no need to pave a road to hell if you’re already in hell because you’ve surrendered to bad intentions and now they’re all that’s left. The logical conclusion from acceptance is that it’s in nobody’s interest to put anything on the web (or anything equivalent) and have it become even more of a consumption-only medium than it already has.
Also, what’s happening right now is, in fact, the flow of information being controlled; to primarily flow towards a few powerful entities, that is. You’re neglecting to consider the effects of power differentials. Those powerful entities need to be constrained for the flow of information to actually be free.
Granted, the solution proposed in the blog post seems a bit too technical and high-friction to really be feasibly, but at least people are thinking about it.
I don’t agree, and your conclusions aren’t obvious to me. All I see is that the only problems are getting information, not putting something into web. And we’re not in hell; in fact, we’re in the very best place and time.
@HetareKing @hobata Is there a link to this blog post somewhere? All I’m getting is a headline and a circular link back to the headline.
Unfortunately, all I can say is that the link in the post works for me and it doesn’t appear to be forwarding to anything. Somewhat ironically, it’s on the Internet Archive, though, so maybe that works for you.
It’s probably a little bit like when people used to copy tapes of their favourite artists in the 80s. And then that was just for private use and home projects.
But this is next level.
