alt Hacker NewsI’m skeptical that the problem they are trying to solve is truly unreasonable bandwidth demands.
Sometimes it feels like what people want is to only serve websites and content to good normal users but not evil bad “scrapers” (because maybe maybe your content will be monetized in some nebulous way) but … you put your content up publicly on the web! That should be part of reasonable use!
EDIT: Lwn.net is perhaps not a fair target of my ire.
“There is also a desire to not impede the operation of legitimate search engines, the Internet Archive, and other such groups. Some sites may add explicit allowlists to, for example, give the dominant search engine access to the site. Such measures have the effect of further entrenching a monopoly that already serves us poorly and should be avoided. We have, thus far, succeeded in that.”
Is reasonable! Many others are not
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I don't think people sit around going "Grrrr who can I ban next?". Instead this stuff gets noticed because you see the webserver at 99% CPU utilization for 2 days straight, check the logs, and see you are somehow getting crawled by half the IPs in New York City.
If it weren't a real problem, these types of articles and services wouldn't exist.
Why the air quotes? Evading a ban and using (potentially ill gotten) residential ips to circumvent that refusal of service, is a bad actor.
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> I’m skeptical that the problem they are trying to solve is truly unreasonable bandwidth demands.
Not necessarily bandwidth demands so much as processing demands. Scrapers have a tendency to hammer on parts of web sites that are computationally expensive to generate - e.g. search results, diffs and blame views in git forges, sorted/filtered/paginated lists, etc. Ordinary users may click a few of those links for things they want to see; scrapers will try to request all of them, even when 99% of them are redundant.