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Cat & mouse game. If you’re defending against a whitehat business scraping with curl from data center IPs, sure. Against a less-savory actor using hundreds of
by wswope 3y ago
Cat & mouse game. If you’re defending against a whitehat business scraping with curl from data center IPs, sure.
Against a less-savory actor using hundreds of IPs from residential proxies/compromised hosts, you’re gonna have a rough time, especially if you’re unwilling or unable to use aggresive fingerprinting or (vomit) CloudFlare. Not to mention CAPTCHAs are generally already a solved problem for scrapers.
- AlphaSite 3y agoRequire auth and it’ll help a ton.
- Zak 3y agoReddit wants people to visit the site, become interested in the content they see, and start participating regularly. That's not compatible with hiding enough content behind a registration wall to thwart sufficiently sophisticated scraping.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoOne of the core features of Reddit is that any person may create as many accounts as they like for free. Changing that would be incredibly disruptive. You could set a minimum karma threshold, but that would only promote karma farming; which is already widespread.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago> One of the core features of Reddit is that any person may create as many accounts as they like for free. Changing that would be incredibly disruptive. I wonder what their monthly active users look like if you filter out 1 person switching through 3 usernames/accounts for example.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- asdadsdad 3y agoreddit might be one of the few last places on the internet that hold the old times of pseudo-names and mindless anonymity. I don't see how changing that would benefit the company. see twitter
- kayson 3y agoWhy is cloudflare vomit-inducing?
- wswope 3y agoWhile I appreciate it as an irreplaceable tool for countering DDoS, its premise is antithetical to a reliable and open web IMO, and it suffers from the same lack of accessible, customer-facing support as other big tech players. Lazy examples from HN algolia search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32912075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32912075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17750801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17750801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30764757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30764757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29839960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29839960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34639212 (Hypocrisy disclaimer: I have sites behind CloudFlare.)
- gnicholas 3y agoUpvoted for “hypocrisy disclaimer”
- tomwheeler 3y agoI intensely dislike them taking over as gatekeepers of the web. Perhaps because my browser is configured to resist fingerprinting and to avoid running arbitrary scripts from random websites, it is very frequently blocked by Cloudflare. As one example, I can no longer browse the site for Lowe's (big box home improvement chain). Consequently, I now buy everything from Home Depot (their competitor). It's astonishing how Cloudflare can do such a poor job of determining the difference between a potential customer and an attacker. Life's too short to solve captchas for an intermediary, so I don't bother, I just find a competitor who wants my business.
- travisjungroth 3y ago
- SheinhardtWigCo 3y agoResidential proxies are a completely solved problem, for companies that actually lose money to them (e.g. Ticketmaster, whose profit is maximized by blocking third-party scalpers so they can do the scalping themselves) For companies that make money by having more MAUs, well, yeah, they're going to have a real "rough time" detecting inauthentic traffic