The rise and fall of robots.txt
www.theverge.com
As unscrupulous AI companies crawl for more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.
  • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    921·
    5 months ago

    I would be shocked if any big corpo actually gave a shit about it, AI or no AI.

    if exists("/robots.txt"):
    no it fucking doesn't
    • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
      50·
      5 months ago

      Robots.txt is in theory meant to be there so that web crawlers don’t waste their time traversing a website in an inefficient way. It’s there to help, not hinder them. There is a social contract being broken here and in the long term it will have a negative impact on the web.

    • DingoBilly@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      Yeah I always found it surprising that everyone just agreed to follow a text file on a website on how to act. It’s one of the worst thought out/significant issues with browsing still out there from the beginning pretty much.