hn • r/hackernews
Comment on: A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website
It's an interesting example. People did very similar things during the "desktop shell modification" scene in the early 2000s, by far the most common thing people modified their desktop shell to do was display a bunch of charts and graphs of semi-random information, usually about their local computer.It was useless in 99.9% of the cases. You don't need or want to have constant access to how much free ram your computer currently has, as if that even meant anything.So, after a few steps, that leads to the question "what is useful information? How do you define that?"A basic attempt at it might be