> asking, "Is that legal?" to scraping posts. Here. In HACKER news.
The capital letters don't make this astonishing. The padmapper vs. craigslist debate was nearly 15 years ago, most people were on craigslist's side (including me) and it was about somebody who was running a site in a less optimal but more human way vs. some startup looking for hockey-sticks.
But I was literally simping for the billionaire (maybe not quite yet then, don't know for sure if he managed it since) against scrapers. They were very much for-profit scrapers, unlike nitter, but the truth is the truth.
The only reason I support scraping Twitter is because it's yet another communications monopoly that was endlessly pushed on us by governments and massive corporations, even though it never made money, and once it finally got traction its priorities were to trash interop and manipulate content. The government should be dictating an interop protocol and expecting everyone to follow it, and instead it is encouraging media monopolies because they are an end run around the first amendment.
If the government created interop protocols for rental property, I'd have been against craigslist. Instead, it seemed very much like some startup play to steal craigslist's content to hopefully bury them, then sell on a valuation that included abusing their new monopoly and making us very much miss craigslist.
Sadly, facebook corralled and trained so many people for so long that their marketplace eventually killed craigslist for most things anyway (didn't have to buy padmapper after all.)