Comment by shiomiru

> I think the real reason most are so obsessed with blocking crawlers is they want “their cut”…

I find that an unfair view of the situation. Sure, there are examples such as StackOverflow (which is ridiculous enough as they didn't make the content) but the typical use case I've seen on the small scale is "I want to self-host my git repos because M$ has ruined GitHub, but some VC-funded assholes are drowning the server in requests".

They could just clone the git repo, and then pull every n hours, but it requires specialized code so they won't. Why would they? There's no money in maintaining that. And that's true for any positive measure you may imagine until these companies are fined for destroying the commons.