Post #1463300

2026-04-15 17:24 UTC

It has been difficult to motivate myself to write new articles, knowing that they will just be collected by scrapers I&#39;ve asked to stop scraping, and then regurgitated to people looking for answers. The only benefit I get from my writing is engaging with people who found it useful. I don&#39;t run ads on it, and theoretical licensing fees from the AI companies (not that they&#39;ve offered, of course) would not actually be much of a motivation. I write for people. So I&#39;m not sure what to do about that.

Replies (5)

@caleb@hachyderm.io 2026-04-15 17:30

@cliffle I had a silly idea a while ago to put basic auth on my blog, with the user/pass written in plaintext somewhere else, like in my social bio or something like that. The idea being that scrapers are not going to bother to use the info from my bio on my blog page. What do you think? You can still RSS the page titles and maybe a paragraph or two without auth.

Open ##1493360
@diondokter@fosstodon.org 2026-04-15 17:31

@cliffle when I'm tidying my front yard, I don't do it for the Streetview car that drives by

Open ##1493362
@wickedshell@mastodon.social 2026-04-15 17:34

@cliffle For what it's worth I've very much benefitted and enjoyed reading your articles. But I also completely understand the feeling on not wanting to feed LLM stuff. I'm struggling with that on the open source side as well. It makes me wish there was a walled off LLM/free zone. But snakes will worm their way in regardless and do their thing. If you find a solution I'd love to know about it. Best thoughts I've had is to run to the fringe with things like gemini, but discoverability is hard.

Open ##1493368
@scvalex@mas.to 2026-04-15 18:06

@cliffle I like reading your stuff. I also have a blog and I am also getting crawled by bad mannered bots [1]. I've decided I basically don't care about them. I write my blog primarily for my friends, random people whom it might help, and future version of myself. I think it's more fun to think of the good I might be doing, rather then dwell on how to screw the bad people. [1]: https://scvalex.net/stats

Open ##1493372
@zachr@infosec.exchange 2026-04-15 20:04

@cliffle Not sure what it's worth from an internet rando, but I really appreciate your writing. Your articles about lilos and async Rust transfomed how I think about concurrency. Thank you for writing them! No idea what to do about actual issue, but there are humans out here among the scrapers and bots. I hope that at some point writing sounds more worthwhile than it does right now.

Open ##1493373