posted in Technology
So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe
www.cole-k.com/2026/07/21/reddit/Replying to @lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com
The entire fucking point of the Web was to make information as easily-accessible as possible, structured and semantically tagged, and consumable by humans and further machine transformation alike. “Scraping” is facilitated by design!
Using Javascript to deliberately break that is evil and every programmer who participates it is a piece of shit. No exceptions.
That’s true but they probably didn’t account for AI data scrapers ramfucking your server so they could steal all the value you assembled for general consumption and serve it themselves.
Replying to @artyom@piefed.social
The scraping wouldn’t be a problem if Reddit simply provided an RSS feed or other data-efficient API. The “ramfucking” is caused by the attempt to block bots; it is entirely self-inflicted.
Remember, it’s all our content to begin with and Reddit does not have any right to try to lock it up for itself.
That doesn’t mean I like all the AI bullshit going on, BTW. But the problem is the generation of the slop, not the data accessibility.
Replying to @grue@lemmy.world
so why was I getting hit with over 1,400,000 request a day to the web URI and not the API by some bot farm in China the other week. They were also hitting other lemmy instances.
I blocked the fuckers, no qualms at all.
Even if they were using the API they were not being nice about their shit.