• Fetus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    7 months ago

    Scraping through a website at the scale they are talking about isn’t really viable. You need access to the API so that you can have very targeted requests.

    This is why reddit changed their API pricing and screwed over everyone using third party apps. They can make more money selling access to LLM trainers than they could from having millions of people using apps that rely on the API.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      Scraping at scale is actually cheaper than buying API access. It’s a massive rising market, try googling “web scraping service” and there are hundreds of services that provide API to scrape any public web page and bypass the blocks for you and render all of the javascript.

      • BatrickPateman@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        7 months ago

        Scraping ia nice for static conten, no doubt. But I wonder at what point it is easier to request changes to a developing thread via API than to request the whole page with all nested content over and over to find the new answes in there.

        • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          7 months ago

          Following a developing thread is a very tiny use case I’d imagine and even then you can just scrape the backend API that is used on the public page for the same results as private API.