[bruiseralmighty]

Wasn't the 'protest' of overpriced or non-existent public APIs for popular websites really the additional server cost due to endless web scraping? The whole concept of a general strike of subreddits seems like an antiquated way try and strong arm Reddit into complying.

If all these subreddit had instead migrated their users to a hastily built alternate frontend that web scrapped reddit.com, the entire mother site could have been taken down quite effectively.

There's plenty of methods for routing around ip-address blacklisting or region blocking.

Just as there's no law against web scrapping there's no law protecting the labor rights of the moderators who work for free. Overall it just strikes me as a weaker axis of attack.

[mrtranscendence]

Aren't those methods potentially expensive? And if you did make a hastily-built frontend backed by scraping, couldn't Reddit continually break it without much effort?