Drew DeVault posted a new blog post titled Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face. He calls out a couple of things that seem to have gotten worse in recent years: bot and abusive traffic.
A lot of internet-era businesses are built on the economic model of the user’s being the product rather than the service provides. For example, you have free search engines and various media platforms that make money by selling advertisements or user information. It’s just a fact of life that if you give something out for free, people are going to try to take as much as they can. There’s no doubt that anyone with a large enough platform is going to have people spending all their time trying to keep costs down when it comes to serving abusive traffic.
Then, you also have companies who have built a business model around stopping abusive traffic, and that often comes at a price of blocking certain users who are using less popular web browsers.
I’m left wondering if smaller companies like Drew’s will be able to operate easily on an internet in the future where providing a free-tier is much more costly due to abusive anonymous traffic. It would be sad to see all the free hosting provided by a few large companies who can afford to take a hit on the free tier because they can make it up with their profits through the volume of their user base.
I tried to get Claude 3.7 Sonnet to write a Hare program to count the number of times it can find “LLM” on Drew’s homepage, but unfortunately the program doesn’t compile. It looks decent considering it’s a fairly new language and there probably isn’t much code out there to learn from. It seems it has a hard time knowing what actually exists in the standard library.