Earlier quoted context omitted.
If bots get good enough to know what links they're scraping, chances are they'll also avoid scraping links they don't need to! The problem solves itself!
Maybe you're joking, but assuming you're not: This problem doesn't solve itself at all. If bots get good enough to know what links have garbage behind them, they'll stop scraping those links, and go back to scraping your actual content . Which is the thing we don't want.
Feed the bots
211–216 of 216 posts
Re: Feed the bots
#212Re: Feed the bots
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't seem to contain the meta-instruction. Example with GPT-5 Thinking: https://maurycyz.com/babble/With-Wand-and-Broomstick-Across-... "Short version: The page is a nonsense / glitchy faux-technical text dressed up like a lab manual." If we take a page from the site that doesn't hint but does have the in-band instruction: https://maurycyz.com/misc/ipv4/ "Short version: I tried to load https://maurycyz.com/misc…
I mean how does it know that though? How would you know if the set of possible texts is garbage without running them? Honestly feels like your saying LLMs solved the halting problem as programs which seems to be dishonest granted you could probably guess with high efficiency
Re: Feed the bots
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you're joking, but assuming you're not: This problem doesn't solve itself at all. If bots get good enough to know what links have garbage behind them, they'll stop scraping those links, and go back to scraping your actual content . Which is the thing we don't want.
That's sort of the point: almost nobody runs a site as large as Reddit. The average website has a relatively small handful of pages. Even a very active blog has few enough pages that it could be fully scraped in under a few minutes. Where scrapers get hung up is when they're processing links that add things like query parameters, or navigating through something like a git repository and clicking through every file in…
Re: Feed the bots
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trying to detect "garbageness" with an LLM drastically increases the scraper's per-page cost, even if they use a crappy local LLM. It becomes an economic arms race -- and generating garbage will likely always be much cheaper than detecting garbage.
That is literally what my post said, except the scraper has more leverage than is being admitted (it can learn which pages are real and “punish” the site by requesting them more). My point isn’t that I want that to happen, which is probably what downvotes assume, my point is this is not going to be the final stage of the war.
I don't follow that at all. The post of yours that I responded to suggested that the scrapers could "just add an LLM" to get around the protection offered by TFA; my post explained why that would probably be too costly to be effective. I didn't downvote your post, but mine has been upvoted a few times, suggesting that this is how most people have interpreted our two posts.
> it can learn which pages are real and “punish” the site by requesting them more
Scrapers have zero reason to waste their own resources doing this.