Bots are currently scraping the internet for LLM training data at unprecedented rates[1][2][3], driving up costs and destabilizing public-facing websites. I want to talk about how this has been particularly difficult for wikis, and has gotten much worse in the last few months.
  • anachronist@midwest.socialEnglish
    13·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • OptimusPrimeDownfall@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      8·
      4 days ago

      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.

        • Kissaki@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          They rent IPs, they can look like residential IPs.

          I don’t know how these IP services work, but blocking them seems like blocking AWS - suddenly you didn’t just block telegram but various websites and services don’t work anymore.

          /edit: the article goes into this and also blocking

          Enter residential proxies, where anyone with a credit card can get all of their scraping requests “laundered” through a network of millions of IP addresses. The wikis get hit sometimes by scraper runs that cycle through a million IPs a day, and they >look like< they’re coming from legit places: mostly residential ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, Charter, etc) where the customer probably doesn’t even know their IP is being used as an exit node for a residential proxy.

          There are companies out there selling realtime databases of residential proxy IPs, although it’s not clear to me how actionable that is when most residential proxies are also used by real people at the same time.

          • Hazelnoot [she/her]@beehaw.orgEnglish
            4·
            4 days ago

            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)