Live data from Hacker News

AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

pod.geraspora.de

231–240 of 466 posts

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#231
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> court ruling Isn't this country dependent though?

Enforcement is not. What does the US care for what an EU court says about the legality of the OpenAI scraper.

I understand there's a balance of power, but I was under the impression that US tech companies were taking EU regulations seriously.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider giving these crawlers access if they paid you?

This is one of the few interesting uses of crypto transactions at reasonable scale in the real world.

What mechanism would make it possible to enforce non-paywalled, non-authenticated access to public web pages? This is a classic "problem of the commons" type of issue.

The AI companies are signing deals with large media and publishing companies to get access to data without the threat of legal action. But nobody is going to voluntarily make deals with millions of personal blogs, vintage car forums, local book clubs, etc. and setup a micro payment system.

Any attempt to force some kind of micro payment or "prove you are not a robot" system will add a lot of friction for actual users and will be easily circumvented. If you are LinkedIn and you can devote a large portion of your R&D budget on this, you can maybe get it to work. But if you're running a blog on stamp collecting, you probably will not.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#233
post #16

OpenAI publishes IP ranges for their bots, https://github.com/greyhat-academy/lists.d/blob/main/scraper... For antisocial scrapers, there's a Wordpress plugin, https://kevinfreitas.net/tools-experiments/ > The words you write and publish on your website are yours. Instead of blocking AI/LLM scraper bots from stealing your stuff why not poison them with garbage content instead? This plugin scrambles the words in the c…

The latter is clever but unlikely to do any harm. These companies spend a fortune on pre-training efforts and doubtlessly have filters to remove garbage text. There are enough SEO spam pages that just list nonsense words that they would have to.

Seems like an effective technique for preventing your content from being included in the training data then!

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#234
post #56

Their appetite cannot be quenched, and there is little to no value in giving them access to the content. I have data... 7d from a single platform with about 30 forums on this instance. 4.8M hits from Claude 390k from Amazon 261k from Data For SEO 148k from Chat GPT That Claude one! Wowser. Bots that match this (which is also the list I block on some other forums that are fully private by default): (?i). (AhrefsBot|AI…

I hope this is working out for you; the original article indicates that at least some of these crawlers move to innocuous user agent strings and change IPs if they get blocked or rate-limited.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cloudflare also has a feature to block known AI bots and even suspected AI bots In addition to other crushing internet risks, add wrongly blacklisted as a bot to the list.

What do you mean crushing risk? Just solve these 12 puzzles by moving tiny icons on tiny canvas while on the phone and you are in the clear for a couple more hours!

If you live in a region which it is economically acceptable to ignore the existence of (I do), you sometimes get blocked by website r̶a̶c̶k̶e̶t̶ protection for no reason at all, simply because some "AI" model saw a request coming from an unusual place.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#236
post #65
post #56

Their appetite cannot be quenched, and there is little to no value in giving them access to the content. I have data... 7d from a single platform with about 30 forums on this instance. 4.8M hits from Claude 390k from Amazon 261k from Data For SEO 148k from Chat GPT That Claude one! Wowser. Bots that match this (which is also the list I block on some other forums that are fully private by default): (?i). (AhrefsBot|AI…

You know, at this point, I wonder if an allowlist would work better.

If you mean user-agent-wise, I think real users vary too much to do that.

That could also be a user login, maybe, with per-user rate limits. I expect that bot runners could find a way to break that, but at least it's extra engineering effort on their part, and they may not bother until enough sites force the issue.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#237
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely ignore the fact that they are also requesting a lot of pages that can be expensive to retrieve/calculate.

Beyond something like running an ML model, what web pages are expensive (enough that 1-10 requests/second matters at all) to generate these days?

Usually ones that are written in a slow language, do lots of IO to other webservices or databases in a serial, blocking fashion, maybe don't have proper structure or indices in their DBs, and so on. I have seen some really terribly performing spaghetti web sites, and have experience with them collapsing under scraping load. With a mountain of technical debt in the way it can even be challenging to fix such a thing.

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#238
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely ignore the fact that they are also requesting a lot of pages that can be expensive to retrieve/calculate.

Beyond something like running an ML model, what web pages are expensive (enough that 1-10 requests/second matters at all) to generate these days?

Run a mediawiki, as described in the post. It's very heavy. Specifically for history I'm guessing it has to re-parse the entire page and do all link and template lookups because previous versions of the page won't be in any cache

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#239
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond something like running an ML model, what web pages are expensive (enough that 1-10 requests/second matters at all) to generate these days?

Run a mediawiki, as described in the post. It's very heavy. Specifically for history I'm guessing it has to re-parse the entire page and do all link and template lookups because previous versions of the page won't be in any cache

The original post says it's not actually a burden though; they just don't like it.

If something is so heavy that 2 requests/second matters, it would've been completely infeasible in say 2005 (e.g. a low power n100 is ~20x faster than the athlon xp 3200+ I used back then. An i5-12600 is almost 100x faster. Storage is >1000x faster now). Or has mediawiki been getting less efficient over the years to keep up with more powerful hardware?

Re: AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

#240

Note-worthy from the article (as some commentators suggested blocking them). "If you try to rate-limit them, they’ll just switch to other IPs all the time. If you try to block them by User Agent string, they’ll just switch to a non-bot UA string (no, really). This is literally a DDoS on the entire internet."

I instigated `user-agent`-based rate limiting for exactly this reason, exactly this case.

These bots were crushing our search infrastructure (which is tightly coupled to our front end).

Post reply on HN