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.
Zoop@beehaw.org 4 days ago
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.
definitemaybe@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
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.