Any person can post on Hacker News. However, if someone made a bot to post to Hacker News, I think most of us would be pretty upset.
- I want my data to be publicly available
- I don't want my data to be processed/distributed/sold without my permission
E.g. individual use is fine, profit making is not.
Which is my expectation with LinkedIn. I want people to see my profile, I don't want them to sell it as marketing leads!
If scraping on linked-in is banned (and linked-in is enforcing it), then I do have have control of my data, since I can change the setting, and it will no longer be public (It's not perfect, since some might already scraped it, but the extend would be much smaller). Also, if I decide to delete my data, linked can do that for data it control, but not for scraped data.
I'm on Hackernews to see interesting articles and read interesting conversation. If a bot can post interesting articles and make interesting conversation, I'm not sure I care that it's a bot. And if a human can't do those things, I'm not sure I care whether or not they're 'real'.
That focus on "we don't care if you self-promote, we don't care why you're here, we just want you to be a good citizen" is part of why I like HN.
It's not completely black and white, but in general I believe that users online have the Right to Delegate[0]. That right should only be legally taken away if there's a really, unbelievably compelling social justification for doing so. I am pretty skeptical that banning web scraping has that kind of justification.
The best is some sort of heuristic like captchas and even they can be outsourced so that the human doing them isn't actually viewing the content.
The thing about a bot which bothers people is the behavior anyway. A bottish acting human would get people just as upset.