Comment by 23B1 13 hours ago
HN when it's a photographer, writer, or artist concerned about IP laundering: "Fair use! Information wants to be free!"
HN when it's bots hammering some guy's server "Hey this is wrong!"
A lot of you are unfamiliar with the tragedy of the commons. I have seen the paperclip maximizer – and he is you lot.
Personally I'm not trying to block the bots, I'm trying to avoid the bandwidth bill.
I've recently blocked everything that isn't offering a user agent. If it had only pulled text I probably wouldn't have cared, but it was pulling images as well (bot designers, take note - you can have orders of magnitude less impact if you skip the images).
For me personally, what's left isn't eating enough bandwidth for me to care, and I think any attempt to serve some bots is doomed to failure.
If I really, really hated chatbots (I don't), I'd look at approaches that poison the well.
Most of those of those artists aren’t any better though. I’m on a couple artists’ forums and outlets like Tumblr, and I saw firsthand the immediate, total 180 re: IP protection when genAI showed up. Overnight, everybody went from “copying isn’t theft, it leaves the original!” and other such mantras, to being die-hard IP maximalists. To say nothing of how they went from “anything can be art and it doesn’t matter what tools you’re using” to forming witch-hunt mobs against people suspected of using AI tooling. AI has made a hypocrite out of everybody.
Something something man understand, something something salary depends on.
I think there’s a difference between crawling websites at a reasonable pace instead of just hammering the server to the point it’s unusable.
Nobody has problems with the Google Search indexer trying to crawl websites in a responsible way