[TeMPOraL]

You hit the nail on the head. It's hard to have sympathy for site operators complaining about scraping, where almost every site does its best[0] to make using it a time consuming, potentially risky and overall annoying ordeal. Not to mention, information asymmetry is anathema to a well-functioning market, and yet no. 1 reason for fighting bots given in the whole thread here is a desire to maintain that information asymmetry.

And that's also the dirty secret behind the "attention economy": it's whole point is to make things as inefficient as possible, because if you're making money on people's attention, you need to first steal it (by distracting them from what they're trying to achieve), and then either direct towards your goals (vs. those of the users), or stretch it out to maximize their exposure to advertising.

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[0] - Sometimes unintentionally. Unfortunately, the overall zeitgeist of UX design is heavily influenced by bad players, so default advice in the industry is often already intrinsically user-hostile.

[ushtaritk421]

> Not to mention, information asymmetry is anathema to a well-functioning market, and yet no. 1 reason for fighting bots given in the whole thread here is a desire to maintain that information asymmetry.

This is exactly right.