Comment by ssl-3
14 hours ago
When companies that earn their money by selling things deliberately make their website hard to access (especially for scrapers -- of any sort), then they're making a choice to abandon their customers.
It seems ruthlessly disappointing to consider, but maybe Adafruit isn't cut out for this whole Internet thing.
Can you elaborate on the logic that makes preventing scrapers (note, you didn't mention actually hindering accessibility technologies) customer antagonistic?
When a product doesn't show up at all using the [potential] customer's chosen tools (whether a search engine like Google, or an LLM like ChatGPT), then that product is invisible.
An invisible product is one that may as well not exist. When a person can't find it, then they also can't purchase it.
(posting this in both comments about this) i am the author of the article. the adafruit blog is not trying to block you my dude(s). we are under constant automated scraping and ddos, largely from ai crawlers, and we use cloudflare to keep the site online at all. the nature of of these things will cause false positives depending on browser, extensions, network, or referrer.
the site publishs full-text rss feeds with no blockers here, no ads: https://blog.adafruit.com/rss
the site respects do not track, privacy badger, and similar tools. the site will probably never pass the purity tests for everyone, the goal is to stay independent, publishing, without selling readers or folding into a mega-platform. we're open source and vc free, chill out about us, ok?
if you still can’t get an article and want it in html, markdown, text, or pdf, email me and i’ll send it directly, i will read it on the phone to you, i am not kidding.
we’re trying, and we’ll keep trying. you gotta meet somewhere.
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