this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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If he thinks locking down the API is going to stop them, he's bumped his head. These companies have more than enough manpower to write and maintain an HTML scraper for Reddit.
Creating a web scraper vs actually maintaining one that is effective and works is two different things. It's very easy to fight web scraping if you know what you are doing.
Right, but these are big companies with lots of talented programmers on hand. If anyone can overcome such an obstacle, it's them.
Also, Google and Microsoft already have a search index full of Reddit content to scrape.
You are right. You would need a team of skilled scrapers and network engineers though would know how to get around rate limiters with some kind of external load balancer or something along those lines.
Rate limiters work on IP source. This is easily bypassed with a rotating proxy. There are even SaaS that offer this. The trick is to not use large subnets that can be easily blocked. You have to use a lot of random /32 IPs to be effective.