TechnologyAnd fediverse sites. Have to update blockers every month or so
Why not require a login to browse?
I didnt see this mentioned- for all the old non-cashed stuff, would it help to throttle it by like 5-10 seconds per request? Maybe also serve a cached “loading” page during the wait.
What we need is a system that detects scrapers, and feeds them an alternative poisoned data set.
People started allowing scrapers because they needed to get in the search engine indexes to get traffic. But getting scraped being a win-win for the scraper and scrapee is long past. Now it's completely parasitic. The search engines are even going out of their way to not send traffic to organic results.
I wonder if it's time to start to create an un-indexable "shadow internet." Block all scraping even the search engines. Maybe put up login walls. How will people find your website? We'll have to go back to word of mouth, link rings, or the like.
The problem is that you can't block all scraping. The scrapers make their bots look like regular traffic, so even if you block all known scrapers, there will be tons that just look like humans visiting your site.
Collaborative list of basic IP blocks of known scraper hosts.
They spoof their ip now
changing IPs is very easy.
This is a great post about such a frustrating and sucky situation. Thank you for sharing it with us here. I really feel for all the smaller sites and webmasters who have to deal with all this absurdity. :(
Like they mentioned, when I hit one of those damn Cloudflare 'prove you're a human' checks -- which is a LOT nowadays -- I definitely do get irritated...but I'm not usually upset with the site owner who is just trying to protect their site. I feel for them. I'm pissed off and disgusted at all the greedy, inconsiderate assholes and corporations who are fucking everything up for us normal people, both on the Internet and off.
I don't know where we go from here, but I hope it somehow gets better soon... ugh.
And so the Tragedy of the Commons plays out, yet again.
There's no cost to being a selfish asshole, so it's sadly not surprising that many individual actors are destroying the public Internet. Like, how can we align incentives to stop this? Regulations/laws are mostly pointless since the very same tactics used to dodge bot detection also make it incredibly hard to identify the originator.
The only other disincentive with a real cost, that I can think of, would be to poison the data fed to scrapers, so they get bad data? That seems expensive to set up, though.
I think TFA has the best solution idea: make it easy to scrape all the useful data using a low-cost standardized system. Then there's no incentive to scrape the website using a stupid, expensive crawler in the first place.
Edit: actually, LLMs make poisoning the data fairly reasonable... When there's a high volume of requests for outdated pages/edit pages/other rarely accessed pages, have the server serve a pre-cached parody version of the root page instead. Pre-build one parody copy of each page with a standardized prompt, like "rewrite this page like it comes from an academic journal of medicine or economics with APA citations for every fact."
