Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Saturday, 05-Apr-2025 16:41:36 JST pistolero

   • iced depresso
   • Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn:
   @miscbrains @icedquinn
   
   > shifting the language just muddies the waters, but fuck me it's late...
   
   Well, the point wasn't language. The point was that something has to change about why you are eating and what you are eating for simple eating to become gluttony. The difference is in context and motivation. (The 1913 edition of Webster's says "Excess in eating; extravagant indulgence of the appetite for food; voracity.")
   
   So there's exploitation, right? There's a difference between employing a person and exploiting them. There's a difference between using FSE's public-facing APIs and scraping FSE.
   
   Or, here's something: I have a small script that scrapes followers. This is a trivial thing, because the APIs are designed to be used, and I wrote it because of Pawoo. The CP guys were showing up there, and sometimes you see an account and that account exists only for CP, right? The account is only an hour old, it has 200 followers. I felt pretty comfortable reasoning that it was one of the dumping accounts (people that don't want to endanger their home server will hop servers, dump a bunch of shit until they get banned there; in the mean time, a bunch of accounts from youjo.love and freak.university and whatever are following that guy) and that anyone following it was someone I should ice right away. So when I saw someone like that, I'd scrape the followers and kill off those accounts. Was this morally wrong? I wanted to get the account's followers before Pawoo killed off the account, so I didn't even put a delay in; I usually put a delay into scripts like that. (And then those people would disappear from FSE, Poast, anyone else that asked for the list.) I don't have any moral issues with doing it like that: it dried the fuckers out, FSE stopped seeing them. I'm against scraping fedi, but that was a case where another concern (getting the pedos away from FSE) overrode the other one.
   
   The reason scraping is bad to do to fedi is because of the effects: it breaks fedi servers, it degrades legitimate use, it provides information to people that want to censor or exploit or destroy fedi, and allowing it incentivizes all sorts of scummy behavior. (The parallels with spam should be obvious.) If it's axiomatic that scraping is somehow an evil activity, we'll have to agree to disagree; I'm fine with people thinking I'm evil.
   f.gif
   • Embed this notice
     Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn: (miscbrains@misc.brainsoap.net)'s status on Saturday, 05-Apr-2025 17:35:21 JST Miscbrains:beastie::segasaturn:

     in reply to

     • iced depresso

     @p@fsebugoutzone.org @icedquinn@blob.cat There's a difference between using FSE's public-facing APIs and scraping FSE.Yes, the difference between coming in the front door and asking permission vs not.Or, here's something: I have a small script that scrapes followers
     I'd scrape the followers and kill off those accounts. Was this morally wrong? No, but it removes your ability to logically object other people doing the same to you.
     
     Here's the thing, i have no issue with you doing what you do. It seems like it's boiled down to "ends justify the means" vs "the means are evil."
     
     I'm mostly just drinking and devil's advocating against a scenario where i'd be in similar situation. And.. I wouldn't be, because self hypocrisy is anathema to me. It would be nice to have the super power to ignore that itch.

     pistolero likes this.