#like yes accounts get h4cked but they could just send an email of “hey there's suspicious activity on your account change your password”

[petiolata]

When your anti-bot algorithms make it impossible to use your website, you're defeating the purpose of having them.

When I first got this today, all I'd done was go to an author's page, find a work I'd finished reading (not on AO3) and bookmark it. Then did a wordcount sort on their works to see if they had any longfics.

None of that is an excessive amount of use, or an unusual way to use AO3 (other than the not reading fics on AO3 part, and I *really* hope that's not the "you're a bot!" trigger because I can't be the only person that reads offline for reasons of disability, preference, poor internet connection, whatever).

"Browse more slowly" what, am I supposed to throttle my internet and LARP as a fanfic reader in 2002? Relive the ole dial-up experience? Count to 10 before every click?

I probably wouldn't have bothered making a griping post for this but a friend mentioned having their Twitter account suspended yesterday because they were falsely detected as being a bot.

And it just makes me wonder--is that how Dead Internet Theory will kill the internet? Not by there being too many bots, but by all the real humans being blocked from using it? It's not hard to program variability into a bot--to make it not post at the same time every day, or to make its clicks randomized so there's not 5 seconds between every one.

It's ironically harder to do that for a human--who browses naturally and can't simply plug an RNG or different timer into their use. Who might post their art every day at 1230PM because that's when their lunch break starts and they're free to upload their morning doodles. Not because they're a bot scheduled to post every day at 1230pm.