I'd link to some blog posts about this an example, but the site they're from went down a while ago.

At risk of giving anyone ideas, why do LLM training scrapers request pages from sites millions of times per day instead of just doing the equivalent of wget -r https://example.com/ ? If the point is just stealing things people have written, what do they accomplish by wasting a web host's resources beyond being an ⊛ to webmasters?

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[–] 1 point 34 minutes ago (1 child)

But WTF is the point of scraping the same data over and over multiple times a second before it even has a chance to change? That's just a waste of resources even on the scrapers' part, because that bandwidth could be used grabbing some other new page instead!

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