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.
  • Zoop@beehaw.org
    24·
    3 days ago

    This is a great post about such a frustrating and sucky situation. Thank you for sharing it with us here. I really feel for all the smaller sites and webmasters who have to deal with all this absurdity. :(

    Like they mentioned, when I hit one of those damn Cloudflare ‘prove you’re a human’ checks – which is a LOT nowadays – I definitely do get irritated…but I’m not usually upset with the site owner who is just trying to protect their site. I feel for them. I’m pissed off and disgusted at all the greedy, inconsiderate assholes and corporations who are fucking everything up for us normal people, both on the Internet and off.

    I don’t know where we go from here, but I hope it somehow gets better soon… ugh.

    • definitemaybe@lemmy.ca
      11·
      3 days ago

      And so the Tragedy of the Commons plays out, yet again.

      There’s no cost to being a selfish asshole, so it’s sadly not surprising that many individual actors are destroying the public Internet. Like, how can we align incentives to stop this? Regulations/laws are mostly pointless since the very same tactics used to dodge bot detection also make it incredibly hard to identify the originator.

      The only other disincentive with a real cost, that I can think of, would be to poison the data fed to scrapers, so they get bad data? That seems expensive to set up, though.

      I think TFA has the best solution idea: make it easy to scrape all the useful data using a low-cost standardized system. Then there’s no incentive to scrape the website using a stupid, expensive crawler in the first place.

      Edit: actually, LLMs make poisoning the data fairly reasonable… When there’s a high volume of requests for outdated pages/edit pages/other rarely accessed pages, have the server serve a pre-cached parody version of the root page instead. Pre-build one parody copy of each page with a standardized prompt, like “rewrite this page like it comes from an academic journal of medicine or economics with APA citations for every fact.”

  • anachronist@midwest.socialEnglish
    12·
    3 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·
      3 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·
          1 day 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·
            3 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)

  • Steve@startrek.website
    1·
    3 days ago

    I didnt see this mentioned- for all the old non-cashed stuff, would it help to throttle it by like 5-10 seconds per request? Maybe also serve a cached “loading” page during the wait.