Are Bots Helping Websites or Just Slowing Everything Down?

Nowadays, it feels like almost every website uses bots or automated bot-detection systems in some way.
They can be useful for filtering spam, blocking abuse, monitoring traffic, and automating repetitive tasks, but there is also a downside.
Sometimes when you search or open a page, the response feels a little slower because the site is checking whether you are a real user or an automated bot.
CAPTCHAs, rate limits, and extra verification can also make the experience annoying for normal visitors.
On the positive side, these systems can make websites safer and reduce fake traffic.

What do you guys think—are modern bot checks actually useful, or are websites overdoing it?

Yesterday I got banned on LinkedIn – probably because of VPN use, since I have no idea what else could get an account banned when it barely has any activity. On Indeed, every single page load makes you solve a captcha. In one community I got banned because I "write like an AI". Did any of this actually help anyone? I don't think so – LinkedIn is still full of AI slop, and idiots and spammers keep showing up in that community regardless. Not sure what Indeed thinks it's protecting against either. All these anti-spam and whatever-else techniques might stop the cheapest, most basic level of spam, but as a developer who's reverse-engineered and successfully bypassed protection from giants like Cloudflare, Stormwall, and DDoS Guard, I know these things can be gotten around too – the only real problem they create is cost. And that was before large LLMs showed up and made bypassing this stuff a lot cheaper.

So from where I'm sitting, these platforms just built a seven-layer hell of moderation without actually solving the spam problem.

William135 said:

Nowadays, it feels like almost every website uses bots or automated bot-detection systems in some way.
They can be useful for filtering spam, blocking abuse, monitoring traffic, and automating repetitive tasks, but there is also a downside.
Sometimes when you search or open a page, the response feels a little slower because the site is checking whether you are a real user or an automated bot.
CAPTCHAs, rate limits, and extra verification can also make the experience annoying for normal visitors.
On the positive side, these systems can make websites safer and reduce fake traffic.

What do you guys think—are modern bot checks actually useful, or are websites overdoing it?

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I think its all depends on the market u r in