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Comment by Zuiii | Hacker News Reader

I include RSS feeds specifically because I want make it easy for website users to use my site, even for scrappers (and independent search engines, and AI training, ..etc). The idea of "stealing" content doesn't even make sense. How does one even steal information.

People who think like this need to get over themselves.

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I live from my website. Stolen content uses my labour but routes its fruits to someone else who adds no value. I'm competing against copies of my own work.

Worst of all, the lazily copied versions of my work introduce serious errors because the authors don't know what they're talking about.

Oh and some copies are used for phishing scams, so that's another concern.

>Stolen content uses my labour but routes its fruits to someone else who adds no value.

This has nothing to do with "web scraping". Scraping means downloading. What you are complaining about is copyright infringement: they are downloading your web pages and re-uploading them elsewhere. That's completely unrelated.

They're the same. It's just a matter of whether a machine or a human does the paraphrasing. With AI, the latter will become very common.

Downloading and uploading are not the same. 'Scraping' a website is just what all of us do every day.

I understand this issue and really feel sorry for anyone who has to deal with this. I just don't understand how explicitly not implementing RSS would even her with this [not saying you specifically claim this]

It enables machine-stealing. The sort where the whole content gets copied and hosted on a content farm. This is admittedly a smaller threat as those rank very poorly in the search results. I was mainly answering directly to the parent comment who doesn't understand why people don't like their work to be stolen.

This is what stops me from open sourcing the whole website, since it's just Markdown. It would be good to open it up to contributions, but the website is already copied enough as it is.

> It enables machine-stealing. The sort where the whole content gets copied and hosted on a content farm.

I understand that but lack of RSS is not going to prevent that. It's barely a roadblock for those who steal.

Having the web pages accessible publicly are what makes machine stealing possible, rss has nothing to do with that.

> It enables machine-stealing.

Publishing your website at all does that. Feeds are not at all required to scrape websites.

My personal favourite: someone stealing a random post, backdating it to a couple of days before I published it, and then sending a DMCA to my hosting provider for my own damn article.

Does that happen? Hot damn. I never considered this attack vector. It's brilliantly evil.

That sounds made up but they don't need an RSS feed to do that. RSS could actually help with your defense because it means others could have a copy of your post from your feed fetched before the liar's.

It's incredibly common to only publish a headline and summary to RSS and then have people click through to your site for the full article, so it seems like you're blaming RSS for what is a user error

This lessens the payload of the RSS as well not shipping dozens of whole articles.

This is what I do. I have RSS feeds on all my websites, but I don't put the whole article in them. This works well enough for my needs.

> People who think like this need to get over themselves.

So it's fine if someone took the fruits of your labor and sold it without permission?

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