Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by matheusmoreira 1690 days ago
> Seriously, I hate scrapers. I hate the people who make scrapers. I hate their lack of ethics. Fuck those guys.

Not everybody in this space is out to destroy your site. Some of us actively try to put as little load on your site as possible. My scraper puts less load on sites than I do when I browse them normally, I've measured it. Really sucks when we get lumped together with the other abusers and blocked.
1 comments
ligerzer0 1690 days ago
Exactly, some of us use scrapers because while we can't go full Richard Stallman, we also don't want to visually sift through ridiculous UI just to look at some basic data/text.
link
matheusmoreira 1690 days ago
> we also don't want to visually sift through ridiculous UI just to look at some basic data/text

Yeah.

First scraper I ever built was for my school portal. Absolutely atrocious user interface. It got to the point that I seriously hated that site so I built a script to log into it and download my information. I just wanted to see my grades without suffering.

link