No, there isn't, it's a bot. Justifying it with a strawman case study doesn't change it.

This is giving "why is this plane full? What in doing is important but what is everyone else doing here?"

I don’t see the sliding scale - if the website didn’t want a bot they could have blocked you. They clearly don’t mind so what’s the issue? You still used a bot.

I fancy the approach myself... but, much like the grand ideas of OSI in networking, Tim Burners Lee's idea of the Web was never what was going to be used and a lot of the original terms/concepts just plain don't make sense for the Web that exists. It was, originally, a true document system, nothing more. It wasn't until many changes from the original idea that it started to be what people wanted & actually use today. Nor was it even part of Tim Burners-Lee's original concept that 99% of Web traffic would be something other than users viewing & editing HyperText documents.

The User Agent would get a HyperText document from a Web server, render it, and show it to the user. You could parse HTML, display images, and follow links - with the assumption the user would want to edit them like any other document. There was no encryption. There was no scripting for dynamic content. Styling was done via semantic markup. There wasn't even any POST when the User Agent term was initially applied. Everything was supposed to be like one big distributed document store instead of centralized hosting on few servers for many client devices.

All that is to say: Regardless what I think sounds nice myself, if the web was just the original vision & definitions instead of everything it changed and grew to become we wouldn't even be using it to have this conversation.

Interestingly, people seem glad to have telephony companies filter bots even though the original idea of the telephone did not call out robocallers as invalid clients. Probably because, unlike the modern Web, the average person gets a chance to see what it means to allow anything inbound even though the original concept never considered robocallers.

Yeah it's sort of weird that people are so used to using their computer to interact with other computers across the internet that the whole thing has become invisible to them: They completely forget that they're using a computer at all. Along come "bots" and suddenly everyone remembers that the whole thing involves computers. Driving the computer by hand for hours was never efficient, but is marginally entertaining I guess.

> for a glimpse at one possible futureverse, check out what the home assistant community is up to, how they assemble then update the ambient information displays on their walls. their USER AGENTS are doing what most HN-style "hackers" dreamed of reading scifi as kids.

I would love some pointers to read up on this, what are some examples of this? Genuinely, not being a troll or ironic

> you know what a browser is called by the web site? check the header that tells the version.

You mean that key whose only legitimate values also call every browser Mozilla? Arguing from the dictionary is so tedious. I'm going to scrape your site, but the idea that you have some obligation to like it because of the definition of the word "agent" is profoundly stupid.

A lot of people live off ads. I block ads. People who live off ads aren't obligated to like it - and are free to take any means to block it without moral hazard.

Can you recommend a specific home assistant community to check out?

This website refers to browsers as browsers. Just because a header in the underlying protocol is named a certain way, that doesn't necessarily reflect what the humans intend.

https://www.ycombinator.com/legal

I downvoted it because you don’t use capital letters and still feel inclined to make people read this rant. Corpo is a really stupid slur and reading this rant was a waste of my time.

[dead]

> not user, an agent on behalf of the user.

Identified by the user agent header. Which most bots fake or leave out to increase the chance of getting where they are not wanted.

Your bot is a good bot? Great, let us know when you've dealt with all the bad bots and we'll open the doors to the remaining (good) bots again.

The worst way to read the information on the internet today is via a LLM.

This is such a grim thing to read.

Fetch my RSS then.

Then you are a uninvited bot that crawls my content in order to send alarms to people to tell them to visit my site?

This is a "what if it's for your own good?" argument. What if I break into your house to clean your toilets? Although amusingly, if you're a "web alerts company" that I didn't contract and sends out alerts in batches on your own schedule, you will probably send a ton of your customers to my site at the same time and slashdot me off of the web entirely.

because they maintain the websites for social status, if the user never sees the specific website or knows they used it, you can't gain any social status

One more reason for the bot difference is the llm bot users are doing almost all the traffic, and it feels wasteful, painful, and there are reports of 99.x% being llm bots just hitting webpages over and over pointlessly.

This is a change. People put up new caching layers, and it urks people running a website in a single small machine. Yes, this could always happen with slashdotting but it's different now.