As someone who’s been on the web since the 90s I hate this.
The web was designed to be user agent agnostic. Desktop, phone, fridge, ai agents, curl, python script - whatever agent you are using shouldn’t matter for access. That’s the whole point of open internet, period.
Same. And just because page size is “low” doesn’t mean shit when they’re flooding requests. Try having public research data and watch how much your costs go up just due to load balancer throughput.
They did have a lot of concerns with abuse though and you can see that in the way the cookies debate went before they were supported in their current form. I think AI crawlers tanking bandwidths for websites and misusing the data they scrape would 100% be something the Mozilla from back then would’ve had concerns over allowing or encouraging.
You’re conflating two different issues. The topic is “for whom the web is for?” not banwidth distribution and optimization.
If LLM bot is being abusive then that’s no different from any other user agent behaving like this and we should expand these protections from intentional/unintentional ddos irrelevant of user agent.
Lol this is such a bizarre comment. Back then, AI wasn’t scraping everything humans made for the profit of a few. It was a non-issue, and therefore you have no standing in claiming that “that was the whole point.”
This works as well on my phone as it does on my computer, and loads faster than most modern websites making it that much more accessible to MORE humans.
The web designer isn’t limiting access, they are expanding on it - for humans. The people actually sentient and able to understand their words rather than just copy and recontextualize them.
As someone who’s been on the web since the 90s I hate this.
The web was designed to be user agent agnostic. Desktop, phone, fridge, ai agents, curl, python script - whatever agent you are using shouldn’t matter for access. That’s the whole point of open internet, period.
Open until your server is down because LLM are overloading it
At my company, we had to implement all sorts of WAF rules precisely for that reason. Those things are fucking aggressive.
Same. And just because page size is “low” doesn’t mean shit when they’re flooding requests. Try having public research data and watch how much your costs go up just due to load balancer throughput.
overloading from 200kb of html? We’re not in dialup era anymore
They did have a lot of concerns with abuse though and you can see that in the way the cookies debate went before they were supported in their current form. I think AI crawlers tanking bandwidths for websites and misusing the data they scrape would 100% be something the Mozilla from back then would’ve had concerns over allowing or encouraging.
You’re conflating two different issues. The topic is “for whom the web is for?” not banwidth distribution and optimization.
If LLM bot is being abusive then that’s no different from any other user agent behaving like this and we should expand these protections from intentional/unintentional ddos irrelevant of user agent.
Instructions unclear, built whole site with nested tables.
Lol this is such a bizarre comment. Back then, AI wasn’t scraping everything humans made for the profit of a few. It was a non-issue, and therefore you have no standing in claiming that “that was the whole point.”
This works as well on my phone as it does on my computer, and loads faster than most modern websites making it that much more accessible to MORE humans.
The web designer isn’t limiting access, they are expanding on it - for humans. The people actually sentient and able to understand their words rather than just copy and recontextualize them.