I'm not defending AI bots overwhelming websites or hackers motivated by Polymarket, etc., but I don't really believe a 30 year old website with "approximately 160,000 source files serving around 2 million pages" is a good litmus test for the state of the online world. What's worse is the absurdity that this basic site offering niche data would be targeted because Polymarket depends on it for some of their bets, something that most websites don't have to deal with. Frankly, that seems like a much more interesting angle to explore than "this old website that should have been re-written multiple times over the last three decades now doesn't have a choice but to be re-written."
Oddly, it seems like the solution, at least in this specific case, is relatively simple (and ironic): pay for an LLM to re-write this site in a modern, scalable, secure way and have that LLM monitor the site to ensure it is behaving correctly. Put this thing in a modern platform behind a proper cache (i.e., throw the whole thing up in Cloudflare) and many of these problems just don't exist anymore. If this site is as basic as it seems, this could be a weekend project.
It's certainly an interesting story, and I don't blame the owner of The Numbers for handling his site the way he has, but framing this as "AI is destroying our beloved internet" just seems obtuse, at least through this lens.