dbingham

I'm losing count of the number of posts I'm reading by organizations with open websites, small projects, and individual developers maintaining side projects about the harm AI company's crawlers are causing.

They are not respecting `robots.txt` and it's costing maintainers of open sites an enormous amount of time and money: time trying to keep their sites up and money for server bandwidth and compute.

We need someone to begin a class action lawsuit against the AI companies to try to force them to respect `robots.txt` and to pay damages to compensate organizations and developers for all the time, bandwidth, and compute they are stealing.

Honestly, `robots.txt` should be enough to hold them accountable, but if it's not legally enough, then adding an item to Terms of Service explicitly denying usage for AI crawling ought to hold up in court.

Logging the IP of every request and tracking additional bandwidth and compute because of them should provide all the evidence needed.

We shouldn't _have_ to do this. But here we are. Are there any orgs that have been harmed who have the resources to form a coalition and take this on?

I'm trying to get better at design, which is really challenge for someone like me with limited aesthetic sense. It really helps to learn by example -- by studying what others have done. Most of the "Design Inspiration" websites seem to be aimed at marketing type sites, but I'm really looking for application or platform design inspiration. This is a community of builders who build just those types of platforms, so it's a logical place to ask:

Which apps, websites, or platforms do you look to for design inspiration? Who do you think really nails both user experience and visual design? Which platforms manage to both look beautiful and work great?