Comment by jraph
2 days ago
I don't know, with her RSS saga, she actually provided a tool to test one's RSS feed reader and helped find bugs and this lead to fixes in many RSS tools, making things better for everyone. She put in the work. I find the approach quite constructive.
Well, yes, it did improve that particular area of software. Although for about 15 years that wasn't really problem for anyone who didn't self-host their blog on a potato attached to the Internet with a phone coupler and copper-wires; you can find comments at HN in the relevant discussions from the people who apparently serve about the same amount amount of (almost) static traffic she complains about while it costs them like $2 monthly or something. Now AI crawlers, those are quite a problem...
While I am personally glad that now there are less infuriatingly stupid network clients around (although, again, those never really amounted to all that much load), and probably adopting a rather caustic attitude at the authors of RSS clients was the only to force them to fix things, but even then: you can do more with a kind word and a gun than with just a gun. Besides, there is some unspoken etiquette between the content servers and content readers; a server that e.g. bans you for exceeding rate-limits when you open the "Full blog archives" page and middle-click at 10 promisingly named links to read them one after another is just rude, personal opinions of the hoster notwithstanding.
P.S. Seriously, max-age=155520? Your server/ISP can't handle serving a ~190 KiB (when gzipped) file even once a day, it has to be almost 2 days? Get it off the public Internet then.