The general consensus here is also that a DDOS attack is bad. I haven't seen objections against respectful scraping. You can say many things about AI scrapers but I wouldn't call them respectful at all.
b) They have a complete lack of respect for robots.txt
I'm starting to think that aggressive scrapers are part of an ongoing business tactic against the decentralized web. Gmail makes self hosted mail servers jump through arduous and poorly documented hoops, and now self hosted services are being DDOSed by hordes of scrapers…
If my website got hugged to death, I would be very happy. If my website got scraped to hell and back by people putting it into the plagiarism machine so that it can regurgitate my content without giving me any attribution, I would be very displeased
Yet HN does it when linking to poorly optimized sites. I doubt people running forges would complain about AI scrapers if their sites were optimized for serving the static content that is being requested.
