this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
839 points (98.5% liked)
memes
22414 readers
2182 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wikipedia is suspect now too. They've sold the site to AI search. Hard to say that they had much of a choice, but the sure did it swiftly and gleefully.
Its all public anyways. Its more like they sold infrastructure access afaik. Which is a smart move. Money aside, unauthorized scraping is a much bigger PITA and can drain resources quickly, including financial resources. Selling access means you can regulate it and also make it go thru appropriate infra; plus it becomes an asset rather than a liability. Not a fan of the wikimedia org lately, but I don't fault them for that one.
Exactly this. They are guaranteed to get scraped regardless. Ask any question of an AI model and the first 'source' it cites is almost always Wikipedia. (assuming it's not like a super technical in-depth question)
Might as well save on server overhead costs and get paid while doing it instead of trying (and failing) to block every possible scraper.
Selling access means the content is primarily available to the extremely privileged - huge "AI" grifts, etc.
For whom?
My local LLM narrowly fetching and caching a page or two isn't what's been hitting infra across the global and making indie sites blow up or die out. Doesn't matter if the small players can't buy the same access as the big players; they don't need it and it's not really for them.
The balance sheet. I didn't mean it in the abstract.