[lolinder]

> only reading the content the user would otherwise have gone through.

Why? My user agent is configured to make things easier for me and allow me to access content that I wouldn't otherwise choose to access. Dark mode allows me to read late at night. Reader mode allows me to read content that would otherwise be unbearably cluttered. I can zoom in on small text to better see it.

Should my reader mode or dark mode or zoom feature have to respect robots.txt because otherwise they'd allow me to access content that I would otherwise have chosen to leave alone?

[mattigames]

Yeah no, nothing of that helps you bypass the ads on their website*, but scraping and summarizing does, so its wildly different for monetization purposes, and in most cases that means the maintainability and survival of any given website.

I know its not completely true, I know reader mode can help you bypass the ads _after_ you already had a peek at the cluttered version, but if you need to go to the next page or something like that you need to disable reader-mode once and so on, so its a very granular ad-blocking while many AI use cases are about bypassing viewing it at all by a human; and the other thing is that reader mode is not very popular so its not a significant threat.

*or other links on their websites, or informative banners, etc

[lolinder]

> I know its not completely true, I know read-mode can help you bypass the ads _after_ you already had a peek at the cluttered version

What about reader mode that is auto-configured to turn on immediately on landing on specific domains? Is that a robot for the purposes of robots.txt?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

And also, just to confirm, I'm to understand that if I'm navigating the internet with an ad blocker then you believe that I should respect robots.txt because my user agent is now a robot by virtue of using an ad blocker?

Is that also true if I browse with a terminal-based browser that simply doesn't render JavaScript or images?

[mattigames]

If you are using an ad-blocker by definition you are intentionally breaking the intended behavior by the creator of any given website (for personal gain), in that context any discussion about robots.txt or any other behavior that the creator expects is a moot point.

Autoconfig of reader mode and so on its so uncommon that is not even in the radar of most websites, if it was browser developers probably would try to create a solution that satisfies both parties, like putting the ads at the end and required to be text-only and other guidelines, but its not popular, same thing happens with terminal-based browsers, a lot of the most visited websites in the world don't even work without JS enabled.

On the other hand, this AI stuff seems to envision a larger userbase so it could become a concern and therefore the role of robots.txt or other anti-bot features could have some practical connotations.

[lolinder]

> If you are using an ad-blocker by definition you are intentionally breaking the intended behavior by the creator of any given website (for personal gain), in that context any discussion about robots.txt or any other behavior that the creator expects is a moot point.

I'm not asking if you believe ad blocking is ethical, I got that you don't. I'm asking if it turns my browser into a scraper that should be treated as such, which is an orthogonal question to the ethics of the tool in the first place.

I strongly disagree that user agents of the sort shown in the demo should count as robots. Robots.txt is designed for bots that produce tons of traffic to discourage them from hitting expensive endpoints (or to politely ask them to not scrape at all). I've responded to incidents caused by scraper traffic and this tool will never produce traffic in the same order of magnitude as a problematic scraper.

If we count this as a robot for the purposes of robots.txt we're heading down a path that will end the user agent freedom we've hitherto enjoyed. I cannot endorse that path.

For me the line is simple, and it's the one defined by robotstxt.org [0]: "A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web's hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced. ... Normal Web browsers are not robots, because they are operated by a human, and don't automatically retrieve referenced documents (other than inline images)."

If the user agent is acting on my instructions and accessing a specific and limited subset of the site that I asked it to, it's not a web scraper and should not be treated as such. The defining feature of a robot is amount of traffic produced, not what my user agent does with the information it pulls.

[0] https://www.robotstxt.org/faq/what.html

[debazel]

robots.txt is not there to protect your ad-based business model. It's meant for automated scrapers that recursively retrieve all pages on your website, which this browser is not doing at all. What a user does with a page after it has entered their browser is their own prerogative.

[mattigames]

>It's meant for automated scrapers that recursively retrieve all pages on your website, _which this browser is not doing at all_

AFAIK this is false, and this browser can do things like "summarize all the cooking recipes linked in this page" and therefore act exactly like a scraper (even if at smaller scale than most scrapers)

If tomorrow magically all phones and all computers had an ad-blocking browser installed -and set as the default browser- a big chunk of the economy would collapse, so while I can see the philosophical value of "What a user does with a page after it has entered their browser is their own prerogative", the pragmatic in me knows that if all users cared about that and enforced it it would have grave repercussions in the livelihood of many.

[lolinder]

https://www.robotstxt.org/faq/what.html

> A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web's hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced.

There's nothing recursive about "summarize all the cooking recipes linked on this page". That's a single-level iterative loop.

I will grant that I should alter my original statement: if OP wanted to respect robots.txt when it receives a request that should be interpreted as an instruction to recursively fetch pages, then I'd think that's an appropriate use of robots.txt, because that's not materially different than implementing a web crawler by hand in code.

But that represents a tiny subset of the queries that will go through a tool like this and respecting robots.txt for non-recursive requests would lead to silly outcomes like the browser refusing to load reddit.com [0].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt

[mattigames]

The concept of robots.txt was created in a different time, when nobody envisioned that users would one day use commands written in plain English sentences to interact with websites (including interacting with multiple pages with such commands), so the discussion about if AI browsers should respect it or if they should not is senseless, and instead -if this kind of usage takes off- it would probably make more sense to have a new standard for such use cases, something like AI-browsers.txt to make clear the intent of blocking (or not) AI browsing capabilities.

[lolinder]

Alright, I think we can agree on that. I'll see you over in that new standardization discussion fighting fiercely for protections to make sure companies don't abuse it to compromise the open web.