Or indeed the users, who have to wade through trash invading their threads?
Or other legitimate users, who now have to answer captchas from CloudFlare just to access their favourite websites?
Ultimately this is a parasitical element, choking the internet. It will kill the things it profits from. Many will give up running these sites, you walk away with your $100k, and no one can ever do it again... you've not created anything of value, but destroyed it.
If $150k/year is “a bit richer” for you you could simply offer to pay that poster that much in exchange for stopping.
The lesson here is that systems that rely on humans to do the 'moral' thing and fail otherwise are bad systems.
Parasites can solve captchas, people with accessibility issues and the poorest of people are the one being locked out.
Our group focuses on scraping for lightly-funded LLM startups who cant pay Reddit/X/etc API fees, and data aggregation for cottage industries (price comparison, etc)
But a LOT of the people in our niche do fraud and spam, so we’re steeped in that culture whether we embrace it or reject it.
Capitalism optimises for value to the customer, not for overall public good.
