[Aurornis]

> that they have to objectively ruin the site for everyone using it. See the API changes and killing off of third party apps.

Third party app users were a very small but vocal minority. The API changes didn't drop their traffic at all. In fact, it's only gone up since then.

The datacenter IP address blocks aren't just for scrapers, it's an anti-bot measure across the board. I don't spend much time on Reddit but even the few subreddits I visited were starting to become infiltrated by obvious bot accounts doing weird karma farming operations.

Even HN routinely gets AI posting bots. It's a common technique to generate upvote rings - Make the accounts post comments so they look real enough, have the bots randomly upvote things to hide activity, and then when someone buys upvotes you have a selection of the puppet accounts upvote the targeted story. Having a lot of IP addresses and generating fake activity is key to making this work, so there's a lot of incentive to do it.

[JDye]

I agree that write-actions should be protected, especially now when every other person online is a bot. As for read-actions, I'll continue to profit off those being protected too but I wouldn't be too bothered if something suddenly changed and all content across the internet was a lot easier to access programmatically. I think only harm can come from that data being restricted to the huge (nefarious) companies that can pay for that data or negotiate backroom deals.

[direwolf20]

Reddit's traffic is almost exclusively propaganda bots.