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0 pointszo14y ago0 comments

From my perspective, the problem is that the data that is offered isn't really "for humans". The data is for convincing the humans to buy/pay or worse, browse and watch ads as a result.

But overall, information is one of those goods that has intrinsic properties like no other. It can be copied, infinitely. And we haven't yet figured out the dynamics of how to reason about it, so it feels like we're pretending they're physical goods.

Edit. Side note. I'd go further and say that some of the data is even worse, it's "offered" with the real intention being to confuse the users into performing non-optimally in the market. Look at Amazon/Ebay/AliExpress/Google listings for evidence of that. Just Google - Google is a ML and scraping power house, and the best they can muster is to be spammed with fake websites and duplicate/confusing listings.

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TeMPOraL4y ago· 1 in thread

You hit the nail on the head. It's hard to have sympathy for site operators complaining about scraping, where almost every site does its best[0] to make using it a time consuming, potentially risky and overall annoying ordeal. Not to mention, information asymmetry is anathema to a well-functioning market, and yet no. 1 reason for fighting bots given in the whole thread here is a desire to maintain that information asymmetry.

And that's also the dirty secret behind the "attention economy": it's whole point is to make things as inefficient as possible, because if you're making money on people's attention, you need to first steal it (by distracting them from what they're trying to achieve), and then either direct towards your goals (vs. those of the users), or stretch it out to maximize their exposure to advertising.

[0] - Sometimes unintentionally. Unfortunately, the overall zeitgeist of UX design is heavily influenced by bad players, so default advice in the industry is often already intrinsically user-hostile.

ushtaritk4214y ago

> Not to mention, information asymmetry is anathema to a well-functioning market, and yet no. 1 reason for fighting bots given in the whole thread here is a desire to maintain that information asymmetry.

This is exactly right.

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