I’d link to some blog posts about this an example, but the site they’re from went down a while ago.

At risk of giving anyone ideas, why do LLM training scrapers request pages from sites millions of times per day instead of just doing the equivalent of wget -r https://example.com/ ? If the point is just stealing things people have written, what do they accomplish by wasting a web host’s resources beyond being an ⊛ to webmasters?

Edit: Let me elaborate. A lot of the answers i’m seeing are just restating the problem without explaining why LLM scrapers are apparently all either coded by idiots or assholes. I know that they’re hitting sites with unreasonable numbers of requests, wasting bandwidth, and making tools like Anubis too important. I know that’s what’s happening. I’m asking why. What they gain from not being even a little intelligent about this.

With all the money and effort (and maybe even brainpower) going into this, surely there’s some explanation beyond incompetence.

  • IndigoGolem@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    2·
    27 days ago

    So they’re just checking as fast as possible to get every update as fast as possible?

    This still sounds like idiot design, scraping hard enough to take down sites. It’s like cutting open the goose that lays lead eggs in the hope that you can get more lead and convince people that lead is better than gold.