> small-time websites adding Anubis proof-of-work

Those were already public. The issue is AI bot ddos-ing the server. Not everyone has infinite bandwith.

> owners of popular Discord channels turning on the setting for phone # verification as a requirement for joining

I still think that Discord is a weird channel for community stuff. There's a lot of different format for communication, but people are defaulting to chat.

> web blogs wanting to put a "toll gate" (maybe utilize Cloudflare or other service) to somehow make OpenAI and others pay for the content

Paid contents are good (Coursera, O'Reilly, Udemy,...). But a lot of these services wants to have free powered by ads (for audience?).

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The fact is, we have two main bad actors: AI companies hammering servers and companies that want to centralize content (that they do not create) by adding gatekeeping extension to standard protocols.