this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Scraping through a website at the scale they are talking about isn't really viable. You need access to the API so that you can have very targeted requests.
This is why reddit changed their API pricing and screwed over everyone using third party apps. They can make more money selling access to LLM trainers than they could from having millions of people using apps that rely on the API.
Scraping at scale is actually cheaper than buying API access. It's a massive rising market, try googling "web scraping service" and there are hundreds of services that provide API to scrape any public web page and bypass the blocks for you and render all of the javascript.
Scraping ia nice for static conten, no doubt. But I wonder at what point it is easier to request changes to a developing thread via API than to request the whole page with all nested content over and over to find the new answes in there.
Following a developing thread is a very tiny use case I'd imagine and even then you can just scrape the backend API that is used on the public page for the same results as private API.