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To prevent or at least cut down on spam? Pretty much the entire reason captcha systems were created in the first place and an entirely legitimate reason?

In addition to spam, preventing bots from buying up all the GPUs and PS5s in the recent past would have been nice.

Though in the end you're the one clicking busses and bikes and bridges and busses again and when you're through that charade, everything is gone anyway because the bots were faster/better at that..

It is up to the website owner to decide how they want to distribute the content, not the reader. What you see as fair is often not fair from the website owner point of view.

If you disagree with this you are always free to create a competing business without such captcha limitations for bots, and put your money where your mouth is.

Think about why the bots exist - it's almost always data theft or other schemes to abuse your API to profit. Taking money from your pocket.