this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
64 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
42994 readers
196 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
People started allowing scrapers because they needed to get in the search engine indexes to get traffic. But getting scraped being a win-win for the scraper and scrapee is long past. Now it's completely parasitic. The search engines are even going out of their way to not send traffic to organic results.
I wonder if it's time to start to create an un-indexable "shadow internet." Block all scraping even the search engines. Maybe put up login walls. How will people find your website? We'll have to go back to word of mouth, link rings, or the like.
The problem is that you can't block all scraping. The scrapers make their bots look like regular traffic, so even if you block all known scrapers, there will be tons that just look like humans visiting your site.
Collaborative list of basic IP blocks of known scraper hosts.
They spoof their ip now
IP addresses can't really be spoofed, but there are other issues that make IP-based filtering impractical. (VPNs, IPv6, malicious reporting, shared IPs, NAT, etc)
changing IPs is very easy.