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> It sucks that these platforms have made creating a single tool or site for interacting with each other increasingly impossible Is it really impossible or jus
by loveparade 3y ago
> It sucks that these platforms have made creating a single tool or site for interacting with each other increasingly impossible
Is it really impossible or just very difficult? To me it seems like it's the latter since alternative frontends as in libredirect [0] exist for many sites. You can't rely on APIs and would need to build custom browser simulation for each site. That's certainly difficult, but doesn't seem impossible?
I don't see how these sites could ever make automation completely impossible without locking out humans as well.
[0] https://libredirect.github.io/index.html https://libredirect.github.io/index.html
- SoftTalker 3y agoSure, ultimately it’s just one computer interacting with another one, exchanging messages over the network, so anything is possible. But is anyone willing to do it; is it worth the effort?
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoIt's technically very easy. It's legally extremely difficult. And they will find you doing your own thing and stop you.
- loveparade 3y agoWell, technically speaking it's impossible for them to "find you" as there is no way to distinguish between a sophisticated enough bot and a human user.
- nunez 3y agoIt's not impossible but writing the Puppeteer or Selenium incantations needed to scrape these sites (whose elements change fairly regularly) is a lot more work than "implement this API and get tokens via OAuth standard grant flow" And that's before you get to the Cloudflare final boss