[w0m]

> and were not called the attackers.

This is the mental mental leaps I'm struggling with here. Did you not live through that era where they were explicitly and repeatedly called out as 'attacks'? They were generally tolerated/hardenee around as they provided value-in-discoverability.

[szszrk]

True, I may have generalized too much.

I did lived through that era. Outside of people actually working for those companies barely anyone known. For many of us (not working for US dotcoms and other big fish) this was a curiosity we learned fairly recently. Especially on "local" media, papers and socials, this discussion was completely missing. Even today.

But now any AI brawl is almost mainstream.

[munk-a]

Just to ensure you don't gaslight yourself - I did live through that era and I worked on and supported a niche community (a MUD) where we did a lot of work encouraging marketing and discoverability through MUD forums as well as making sure our page was accurately and minimally keyword tagged and highly available for indexers.

In the time since that era search engines have transformed into platforms themselves that do engage in more parasitic behavior but it's important not to assume that the way it is now is how it always was - that's a rather defeatist path to walk down where you ignore awareness of the fact that there can be a highly profitable non-enshittified search engine that supports, rather than destroys, the ecosystem it benefits from.

It was better and, if we're diligent, it can be better again.

[achr2]

Ding. Ding. Ding. "Provided value to the content author". AI scrapping negatively impacts the content author with zero compensation. There is no mutual benefit.