• diyrebel@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    You probably benefit from bots without realizing it. Even if you don’t code or install a bot yourself, you might visit a site that runs with scraped content. I discovered that one of the real estate sites that I scraped was itself showing scraped content. Most likely at some point you’ve bought airfare from a consolidation site where the data was not only fed by the shared db but also showed flights from some of the more protectionist small airline sites.

    I wish the general public were more aware of this. The masses unwittingly support the anti-bot measures without realizing the harvested data is often made available to everyone via another (improved) UI.

    Cloudflare works hard to demonize bots.