I think there’s a difference between crawling websites at a reasonable pace instead of just hammering the server to the point it’s unusable.

Nobody has problems with the Google Search indexer trying to crawl websites in a responsible way

This submission has nothing to do with IP laundering. The bot is straining their server and causing OP technical issues.

Personally I'm not trying to block the bots, I'm trying to avoid the bandwidth bill.

I've recently blocked everything that isn't offering a user agent. If it had only pulled text I probably wouldn't have cared, but it was pulling images as well (bot designers, take note - you can have orders of magnitude less impact if you skip the images).

For me personally, what's left isn't eating enough bandwidth for me to care, and I think any attempt to serve some bots is doomed to failure.

If I really, really hated chatbots (I don't), I'd look at approaches that poison the well.

HN isnt a monolith

Most of those of those artists aren’t any better though. I’m on a couple artists’ forums and outlets like Tumblr, and I saw firsthand the immediate, total 180 re: IP protection when genAI showed up. Overnight, everybody went from “copying isn’t theft, it leaves the original!” and other such mantras, to being die-hard IP maximalists. To say nothing of how they went from “anything can be art and it doesn’t matter what tools you’re using” to forming witch-hunt mobs against people suspected of using AI tooling. AI has made a hypocrite out of everybody.