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I used to work on spam fighting.

This sort of solution is frequently proposed but doesn't work, because:

• Serving costs are rarely the problem. Normally it's annoying actions taken by spammers and the bad reaction of valuable users that matters, not the machine cost of serving them.

There are occasional exceptions. Web search engines ban bots because left unchecked they can consume vast CPU resources but never click ads. However, they only get so much bot traffic because of SEO scraping. Most sites don't have an equivalent problem.

• There is no payment system that can do what you want. All attempts at creating one have failed for various hard reasons.

• You would lose all your users. From a user's perspective I want to access free content. I don't want to make micropayments for it, I especially don't want surge pricing that appears unrelated to content. Sites that use more typical spam fighting techniques to fend off DDoS attacks or useless bot traffic can vend their content to human users for free, well enough that only Linux users doing weird stuff get excluded (hint: this is a tiny sliver of traffic, not even a percentage of traffic but more like an occasional nuisance).

• You would kill off search engine competition. Because you benefit from crawlers, you'd zero rate "good" web bots using some whitelist. Now to make a new search engine I have to pay vast sums in bot fees whilst my rich competitors pay nothing. This makes an already difficult task financially insurmountable.

The current approach of using lots of heuristics, JavaScript probes and various other undocumented/obscure tricks works well. Cases like this one are rare, caused by users doing weird stuff like committing protocol violations and such users can typically escalate and get attention from the right operators quickly. There are few reasons to create a vast new infrastructure.



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