That's totally understandable though. I insist on meeting in public as well... It's the real world, safety is most important.

The thing with websites is they already allow me to make thousands of requests from my browser. What harm does it do if I make a bunch of requests from a script? I don't see it.

> The solution to the automation problem is to do what most companies do and have registered API integrations.

Yeah, those are pretty great. I always use those whenever possible. Many of the sites I use lack those though. Some have APIs so badly designed that scraping their web site actually results in fewer requests and less overhead.

I generally appreciate registered API integrations, but the trouble is, for the most sites that are most problematic for benign automation, they usually don't have enough demand or revenue to justify well-maintained APIs.

I tend to think the solution is more to somehow make the market prefer more decentralized solutions, preferably federated. Not having one big target for bad actors means much less effort applied to attacking any one of the targets.

Dating might be a bit off topic, but I can see both sides as well. Women have genuine risks, and are very justified in taking precautions. But for the majority of decent guys, it can be tiresome to be constantly treated like you're an evil violent stalker. Maybe it needs a similar solution - a movement to local connections where people can have reputations that you can trust.