[qingcharles]

I'm genuinely scraping a certain social network that doesn't have an accessible API to do what I need. My user is logged in and I just automate the logged-in browser to go to the pages and get the data I need into a console so I can get the data I require.

If there was an accessible API to do what I need, I wouldn't do this because scraping sucks. I have to write 100 JavaScript edge cases to handle all the times the host's servers fail in very weird ways. Plus, walking DOMs on these shitty sites with 10,000 nested divs is not fun. GPT helps with this.

It's net-positive for the host though, as I upload a lot of valuable content that their users genuinely like, but it sucks that I have to be sneaky to get the data I need.