Bummer. I have used them a lot when I was ripping my cds. Anonymity is a massive value of the web (at least the appearance of anonymity). I wonder if there is a way to have a central anonymous system that just relays trust, not identity.

So maybe something like you can get a token but its trust is very nearly zero until you combine it with other tokens. Combining tokens combines their trust and their consequences. If one token is abused that abuse reflects on the whole token chain. The connection can be revoked for a token but trust takes time to rebuild so it would take a time for their token trust value to go up. Sort of the 'word of mouth' effect but in electronic form. 'I vouch for 2345asdf334t324sda. That's a great user agent!'

A bit (a lot) elaborate but maybe there is a beginning of an idea there, maybe. Definitely I don't want to loose anonymity (or the perception there of) for services like musicbrainz but at the same point they need some mechanism that gives them trust and right now I just don't know of a good one that doesn't have identity attached.

These AI crawlers already steal residential user connections to do their scraping. They'll happily steal your trust tokens too…