Technology

59607 readers

3531 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

662

Reddit blocking all major search engines, except Google (readwrite.com)

submitted 4 months ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

186 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] recapitated@lemmy.world 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I work for a different sort of company that hosts some publicly available user generated content. And honestly the crawlers can be a serious engineering cost for us, and supporting them is simply not part of our product offering.

I can see how reddit users might have different expectations. But I just wanted to offer a perspective. (I'm not saying it's the right or best path.)

[–] cordlesslamp@lemmy.today 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

Can you use something like the DDOS filter to prevent AI automated scrapings (too many requests per second)?

I'm not a tech person so probably don't even know what I'm talking about.

[–] generaldenmark@programming.dev 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I worked with a company that used product data from competitors (you can debate the morals of it, but everyone is doing it). Their crawlers were set up so that each new line of requests came from a new IP.. I don’t recall the name of the service, and it was not that many unique IP’s but it did allow their crawlers to live unhindered..

They didn’t do IP banning for the same reasoning, but they did notice one of their competitors did not alter their IP when scraping them. If they had malicious intend, they could have changed data around for that IP only. Eg. increasing the prices, or decreasing the prices so they had bad data..

I’d imagine companies like OpenAI has many times the IP, and they’d be able to do something similarly.. meaning if you try’n ban IP’s, you might hit real users as well.. which would be unfortunate.

[–] recapitated@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

We have a variety of tactics and always adding more

[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Blocking bots is hard, because with some work they can be made to look like users, down to simulating curved mouse movements from one button to the next if you are really ambitious.

[–] JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

So your saying reddit's activity analytics can't necessarily tell the difference between human activity and bot activity?

So the actual number of people using reddit vs bots isn't very clear. Someone should tell Reddit's share holders that's there's no way to tell if the advertisements are actually being viewed by people, and there's no way to tell how much the activity reports have been inflated by bots. I bet they wouldn't like that very much.

[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 3 points 3 months ago

Always has been. Technically the server sees no difference in what a browser does vs what a bot does: Downloading files and submitting requests.