One alternative is to make simple, efficient, and where appropriate even static sites that can scale to meet the demand.

The HIBP hashes distribution is a great example.

What are "bots"?

If I use Claude to gather and summarize information for me, is that a "bot"? Because I recently hit that wall and it wasn't great. Turns out in our quest to fight "bots" we also force humans to do the manual labor of copy/pasting information.

Why would bots "overwhelm" a site is another discussion — I find it really hard to create a website that would be "overwhelmed" by traffic these days, computers are stupidly fast.

But what's the alternative to shops strip searching you every time you want to buys something? Shops need a way to prevent looters overwhelming them, and there's no perfect way to distinguish real shoppers from looters.

The alternative would be tar traps that only a bot would “see” and interact with and thus be caught by. Default to annoying machines not people.

PoW challenges that make bots not viable.

You're right, we need big tech to protect us from the problems big tech created.

In the olden 20th century, we had a term for that...

Whats your argument

mCaptcha, ALTCHA, Cap, Friendly Captcha, Private Captcha, Procaptcha, Anubis... there are literally dozens of open source alternatives that aren't feeding the Do Be Evil company... not to mention all of the commercial alternatives - if for whatever reason, you do feel like paying for a service that costs nothing to offer

[dead]

Maybe ai companies should have invested any of those billions of dollars into safe and equitable ways of rolling out their new surveillance machines. Oh right that was never the point and this only serves to further that. Got it.