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Comment by brimble | Hacker News Reader

It is definitely super annoying that companies are allowed to spy on us and do all kinds of crazy things with our data, all using computers and automation and "bots" and such, but individuals are increasingly not allowed to use automation to help us out online. Seems rather one-sided. On the other hand, I get that abuse is a huge problem. I do wish at least bots operating at roughly human request rates & daily total requests were considered OK and universally allowed without risk of blocks or other difficulties leading to increased maintenance costs (so, making them less valuable).

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Sometimes the scraping situation gets kinda ironic. I worked at a large eRetailer/marketplace and obviously we scraped our major competitors just as they scraped us (there are four major marketplaces here). So each company had a team to implement anti-scraping measures and defeat competitor's defences. Instead of providing an API everyone decided to spend time and money on this useless weapons race.

Absent someone breaking really far away from the pack, that's a classic example of one type of "bullshit job" called out in Graeber's book... Bullshit Jobs. Zero-sum, ever-escalating competition. Militaries are another obvious example (we'd all be better off if every country's military spending were far closer to zero—but no one country can risk lowering it unilaterally, and may even be inclined to increase theirs in response to neighbors, which sometimes gets so insanely wasteful that you see something like the London Naval Treaty or SALT come about in response) but so is a great deal of advertising and marketing activity (you have to spend more only because your competitor started spending more—end result, status quo maintained, but more money spent all around)

I wonder how anyone in IT could take Graeber seriously. One of his opinions about programming was that programmers work "bullshit jobs" for their employer and do cool open source stuff in their free time which is demonstrably false.

The presentation of that in the book, based off a message from someone in the industry, doesn't seem out of line with the overall tone and reliability-level that Graeber explicitly sets out in the beginning, which is both that the book is not rigorous science and that it's mainly concerned with considering why people's perceptions of their own jobs would be that they're bullshit.

[EDIT]

> One of his opinions about programming was that programmers work "bullshit jobs" for their employer and do cool open source stuff in their free time which is demonstrably false.

Further, I'm not even sure that's incorrect. It can both be true that most open source (that's actually used by anyone) is done by people who are paid to do it, and that most programmers have very little interesting or challenging to do at work unless they work on hobby projects—maybe open source—in their free time.

The overall letter as quoted in the book, and Graeber's commentary on it, actually makes some good points aside from all this. Things don't have to be perfect to be useful.

The job being un-interesting and un-rewarding doesn't make it bullshit. The job of a truck or a taxi driver is boring as fuck, but it's not bullshit.

A company my previous employer partnered with once asked us to integrate with them.. via scraping and using bots to fill out forms.

Which would have been fine except they also imposed terribly low rate limits with no ability to check them.

We eventually pulled the partnership since it was more work than value.

A lot of data I provide to services is exposed to other individuals so that the service can function. They doesn't mean that data belongs to those people or that they can feely use that data elsewhere.

Allowing unfettered scraping and repurposing of data would have a chilling effect on all types of services. For example I wouldn't necessarily want a bot to scrape my comment history on HN, doxx me, and share my identity and comments with others.

I believe whenever the “no automation/scraping/bots” clause in Ts&Cs has been test in court they have never held up. However that’s not to say a service can’t just cancel your account if you are found to be using one.

Running a site thats had a bot get stuck in a loop and suddenly x10000 times the request rate, when they go wrong it’s super annoying for the website owner. We ultimately just banned the whole AWS ip ranges.

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