Meta is a terrible company. They aren’t being at all mannerly scraping everything. At the very least, the effects of copyright law on their use of human-written material is arguable. I feel that we should all give fake content to Meta’s AI scraper, or something similar. I believe that every time someone implements a scraper junkyard, it should be individual, highly customized, and idiosyncratic, in order to give the people at Meta, Google, OpenAI and others problems. I quit goofing on Meta because I was worried about costs of ridiculously high traffic to my $6-a-month VPS. I should probably have written my infinite website program with some kind of rate limiting, a fixed number of requests per day perhaps, and then give out 503s the rest of the day. bork.php already waits a randomly-chosen delay with a mean of about 14 seconds on each request.
I think the sentiment here is 10000% correct. And I’m glad someone made a molasses of a black hole.
Quote Citation: bruceediger.com, “Goofing on Meta’s AI Crawler - Information Camouflage”, 2025-11-13, https://bruceediger.com/posts/goofing-on-meta/