• phr0g@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I still believe that the ML companies “argument” is just a giant smokescreen. Reason is simple: ML companies can, and probably always have, just scrape the website. Why build an integration for every API under the sun if you can just build a web crawler once and be done? There are even existing, free implementations available so that’s an absolute no-brainer.

    It’s about killing independent clients, nothing else.

    • EfreetSK@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Actually when I think about it you are absolutely right. The ML argument is complete bullshit. I mean to train a ML algorithm an API is nice but scraping should do just as fine. I don’t know how complicated the Reddit API is but you essentially need just GET so I guess not that much. How much time would a development team need to switch the implementation from API to scrape? A week? We’re in corporate world so let’s say a month with all the corporate bs around. That’s still nothing

    • The dogspaw @midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Maybe he’s so incompetent that he honestly doesn’t know that machine learning companies don’t need api access to do what they do