Scenario one: you use software to connect to their server and download a webpage. You are a user.

Scenario two: you use software to connect to their server and download a webpage. You are a "bot".

Make it make sense

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

	▲	Flashtoo 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> they maintain the websites for social status Are you implying that's a bad thing? Doing things for social status has been an integral part of society for millennia. It's a legitimate motivation that can benefit both the recipient of the status and the rest of society. In this specific case, if you assume that the author makes content that is useful to you only because of the social status reward, taking away that reward means the author will stop making content that is useful to you.

▲

--_-- 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.