I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic
A developer reports that their website experienced severe performance degradation due to aggressive scraping by AI bots and automated summarization services following a post on Hacker News. The incident highlights the growing tension between content creators and AI companies regarding web traffic and data usage.
Why it matters
This reflects a broader industry struggle where independent websites are being overwhelmed by automated traffic that provides no value to the site owner.
For the past few years, I've been working on sprinklz.io , a customizable feed reader that can, among other things, deprioritize certain topics from your news feed.
A month ago, I posted it to HN , and it got a hundred or so upvotes, nice! It seems like people are really tired of hearing about LLMs, and they enjoyed being able to deprioritize them from their feed. It was a good demo of why a tool like this is useful. Everything was looking up, and then…
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