John Brunner and Alvin Toffler both made stark warnings wrapped in futuristic giddiness about things like it. People like Fuller no doubt thought polling on a large scale was terrific. There were old usenet groups and BBS subs (minus the money aspect) experimenting with the model. I do not believe they ever are or were good in a largescale model (money or not).

I mean wisdom of crowds, super-forecasters, calibration and pre-registration are useful tools that can result in better predictions, turning it into online gambling is where it went sideways.

It would not make any difference.

> Read the Docs, a non-profit that hosts documentation for open-source software, who watched a single crawler download 73 terabytes of zipped HTML in one month, costing it over $5,000 in bandwidth

From the article.

Not the same site, but an example of the same issue.

I agree. I've seen it happen before on a project I use. I decided to take a look at the repo for one of the plugins, and I saw a heinous issue that basically was TELLING (not even asking) the maintainer to fix it.

Deplorable behavior indeed

they both have a risk of harm which the site operator was no longer comfortable with.