Bots

Open3DLab reports a bulk scrape that congested community download servers. The crawler claimed a Roblox affiliation; its purpose remains unconfirmed.

An outage can empty a network's traffic chart without stopping its bots. Cloudflare follows the requests; HN questions the limits of that view.

A feed reader's launch brought persistent bot load, not just readers. The discussion adds countermeasures and the cost of blocking legitimate visitors.

Wikimedia found unapproved agent edits and heavy automated traffic, but no compromised systems. Who pays to keep the public web usable?

AI is not just changing how developers learn. It is consuming the work of educators while destroying the income that lets them keep producing it.

404 Media's Jason Koebler on the emails his newsroom now gets from AI agents — and HN's debate about captcha walls, free tiers, consent and who is actually to blame.

A small puzzle app's ad campaign billed 56 installs. The raw analytics show 33 of them opened the app once, spent zero seconds, and never came back — plus what 270 HN commenters added.

When colleagues, friends, and newsletter writers send unfiltered AI output, the author proposes a new signal: AI; Didn't Read — a polite way to say unedited AI slop isn't worth the bandwidth.

For every page load Nick Gray sees, 214 more happen unseen — and Claude read 35,000 of his pages for every visitor it sent.

TIME serves AI crawlers a stripped-down markdown site with token-billed ads that no human ever sees — a first look at the bot-first web.