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AI companies cause most of traffic on forums

(pod.geraspora.de)
770 points ta988 | 1 comments | 30 Dec 24 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mentalgear ◴[30 Dec 24 17:42 UTC] No.42551541[source]▶
Note-worthy from the article (as some commentators suggested blocking them).

"If you try to rate-limit them, they’ll just switch to other IPs all the time. If you try to block them by User Agent string, they’ll just switch to a non-bot UA string (no, really). This is literally a DDoS on the entire internet."

replies(5): >>42551717 #>>42551976 #>>42552122 #>>42552700 #>>42552885 #
1. aaroninsf ◴[30 Dec 24 19:44 UTC] No.42552700[source]▶
I instigated `user-agent`-based rate limiting for exactly this reason, exactly this case.

These bots were crushing our search infrastructure (which is tightly coupled to our front end).