alt Hacker NewsScenario 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
Replies
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.
You’re missing the part about the human who interacts with the webpage.