> But what's the difference between one user making 900k hits and 900k different users making one hit? What’s the difference between giving 900K meals to one p

> But what's the difference between one user making 900k hits and 900k different users making one hit? What’s the difference between giving 900K meals to one person and feeding 900K people? The former is being abusive, wasteful, and depriving almost 900K other people of food. They are also being deceitful by pretending to be 900K different people. Resources are finite. Web requests aren’t food, but you still pay for them. A spike in traffic may mean your service being down for the rest of the month, which is more acceptable if you helped a bunch of people who have now learned about and can talk about and share what you provided, versus having wasted all your traffic on a single bad actor who didn’t even care because they were just a robot. > makes me suspect there's substantial incompetence in the solutions deployed to serve them So you see bots scraping the Wikipedia webpages instead of downloading their organised dump, or scraping every git service webpage instead of cloning a repo, and think the incompetence is with the website instead of the scraper wasting time and resources to do a worse job?