|
|
|
|
|
|
by oceanplexian
1227 days ago
|
|
|
The dirty secret of how so many social media giants got their initial traction in the early growth stage they scraped content. LinkedIn is one I have personal knowledge of. Facebook another. How do you think they got a critical mass of users? Scraping and fake engagement. Back in the 00's when they were startups operating in little offices in the SF Bay, they had teams of people running Beautiful Soup and were building bots to build profiles and stuff. I'm actually not really sure I have an opinion on the ethics of it. Same argument as Adblock. You don't get to control how people consume your content if you put it out in the world for free. That goes for profiles, or articles, reddit posts, StackOverflow, etc. The only thing that's ironic is that large tech companies throw a fit whenever you want to turn the tables and scrape them. |
|
|