Let’s two of them die together
Blocking other search engines will hurt Reddit, all else held equal. But not by that much. Google is seriously dominant in the search engine market.
kagis
Yeah.
https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
According to this, Google has 91.06% of the search engine market. So for Reddit, they’re talking about cutting themselves off from a little under 9% of people searching out there. Which…I mean, it isn’t insignificant, but it isn’t likely gonna hurt them all that badly.
It’s also worth noting that the 9% they cut off was probably the group more inclined to already be using alternatives to Reddit anyways.
You underestimate the amount of average joes that use stuff like DuckDuckGo
Seconding this. I work in IT, and the number of tech-illiterate people using DuckDuckGo as their default search engine is astounding. It’s got to be about 10% of our users (none of whom are in tech roles).
I would actually think that the 9% they cut off would be more likely than the 91% to be using Reddit.
Yeah I thought the same so it’s good to see the numbers. I don’t think people realize that to support a search engine means letting them crawl your pages which means serving all your pages to them, which costs server resources. A lot of sites get more crawler load than load from actual users viewing pages. It’s a real cost.
Still, you’d think they could manage to support DuckDuckGo at least. Or a small set of search giants to give some appearance of supporting competition.
with threads too
One only can hope, but until people learns that you can use other browser and other search engine not likely (I am talking on Google side ofc, Reddit might be affected by this in the long run).
Hi, I’m new here. Because of the bullshit with Reddit. Greetings fellow Lemmy people.
Welcome to our shithole.
Federated shithole(s)
More akin to a rabbit-hole, due to that.
But who said rabbits don’t shit in their holes?Oh! And the soil is transparent.
Thanks. :)
Welcome aboard. It’s not much, but she’s got it where it counts.
Thank you very much. I’m liking it.
In the wubba-wubba
And me, hello!
Hi!
👋👋 :)
Uppies for all of you!
Welcome!
Welcome new lemmings!
Thanks
I got tired of the censorship and blatant disrespect for the end user. Also justiceserved and the constant spam messages from the mods there, never been a member of that community and i just wanted them to stop harassing me. Called me a nazi and some other stuff for participating in mandela effect subreddit.lots of quacks there but really now, a nazi?
Edit:i mean it’s deeper than that but they we’re very hateful and reddit muted me for 3 days over…nothing? They even actively seeked out my username on social media and attacked me there through private messages and fake accounts and when i brought this to reddit attention they muted me .
Welcome! Genuine advice for a newcomer: look around, figure out what instances you like, and shift away from lemmy.world to an instance that requires a sign-up request and which comports with your values. There is an account migration feature to make this as easy as possible.
It’s different to what people are used to, but in my experience a huge number of the worst people migrating from reddit went straight to one of the open instances. A lot of them were banned over there for quite legitimate reasons.
They know that they can’t operate their own asshole instances for long because they’ll get defederated, and they don’t want to deal with being known to an admin who has actual principles, so open sign up is their thing, and those instances are filling up with them.
Honestly I would like to see a feature that flags if a user’s instance has open sign up.
It’s getting to the point that if someone is still on an open instance, they’re a little sus to me. It’s easier to trust people who come from instances whose policies I agree with.
I mean I joined lemmy.world in the migration from Reddit and haven’t really seen any problems with being here. I tried joining one of the ones that needed a sign up request when I first switched to Lemmy but I didn’t want to have to deal with waiting to use Lemmy. I haven’t really noticed any problems being on lemmy.world and personally I don’t even look at what instances people are from. I just treat it like reddit, we’re all using Lemmy at the end of the day.
Well, maybe you don’t get into the kinds of discussions I do, or our values are different. It seems like particularly when I say anything advocating for minorities it attracts a slew of reactionaries who are persistent and impossible to reason with, and two of the places I’ve noticed they tend to come from are lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, both largeish instances with open sign up. I haven’t noticed any particularly reactionary instances apart from the tankie ones.
This is probably the reason a number of instances have defedded from .world, so you are probably getting more of those kinds of people, and less of the people who would object to that kind of hatred, whether you’ve noticed it or not.
And I’ve noticed this problem seems worse here than it was on reddit, but I’ve realised it makes sense because the more vocal people are the ones more likely to leave or get booted from reddit, so of course we get them here, and of course the ones who have covert ideologies tend to go for open sign up.
Personally I prefer to be on an instance that I know is roughly aligned with my values so I know I won’t have to make the case to my admins that hate is bad and should be moderated out.
Maybe what I said should’ve been more neutrally stated, but it is just my opinion.
I mean I notice people like that but I never really pay attention to what instance they’re from. They’re usually a minority in any post I see anyways though and are being downvoted a bunch. Most of the time I see lots of fairly progressive people or at worst people who were supporting Biden unconditionally and trying to call anyone who pointed out any problems with him bots. Maybe it’s cause I’m still using Lemmy mostly like I used reddit and treating it as one unified platform instead of a bunch of smaller connected ones. But personally I’d prefer being on an instance that allows me to connect to as many other instances as possible cause personally I don’t want some admin team telling me who I can and can’t interact with, I’d much rather just pick communities I like no matter what instance they’re on that I like and trust the communities more with the moderation. I’d rather handle blocking instances and communities myself rather then leaving it in the hands of admins that could power trip. Again maybe that’s just my mindset from Reddit, personally I’ve enjoyed Lemmy so far and haven’t really noticed any problems on world.
Right well the only issue with world in that case is that other instances defed from it, so you do have admins telling you what you’re not allowed to see, but you’re unaware of it because you’re cut off from them.
Like I said, I tend to attract that sort of person just by saying things they don’t like and I’ve noticed a pattern. Some other instances have noticed that pattern too which is why they defedded.
Bro… What?!? I’ve only been here a day and I have no clue what any of that means lol
Lemmy isn’t one service like Reddit. It’s a piece of software where anybody can run their own lemmy instance. Lemmy.world is the most popular, but there are many others. And those choosing to run an instance can “federate” with other instances, which means as a user you can see posts and comments from the other instance even though you are logged into the one you have an account on.
So the commenter is recommending you look at posts or comments from users on other instances that have more stringent sign up policies, and migrate your account there. Since your account is new, you likely don’t need to spend the effort on migrating your account and instead can just set up an account on another instance/server.
But it’s also fine to stay on lemmy.world. Just be respectful, voice your opinions like you would in person with other humans, and you’ll be fine. And if you’re just here for the memes, that’s ok too! Enjoy them! And welcome to lemmy.
Hey, thanks for the detailed explanation! That certainly helps, but it’ll probably take me a while to fully get it. I signed up using voyager and it didn’t tell me anything like that. I’m sure it’ll make more sense as I get used to it. So can I not see all posts from other instances?
It’s a bit like email, if that helps you understand it. If you use Gmail but a friend uses Yahoo, you can still both email each other.
Yeah, there are many instances, and many that have purposefully been defederated by lemmy.world. Often for good reason (CSAM, an abundance of spam accounts, violent or hateful rhetoric, etc). But generally lemmy.world and its federated instances are pretty great.
Ok, sounds like I’ll just stick with .world for a while until I get my “sea legs”
I think this this guy is going to end up on dbzer0 once he gets his sea legs. Of note the piracy communities over there will be some of the few things you can’t access from .world.
As an option, I’d recommend lemmy.today
It’s an instance that stays away from all the drama and just federates with everyone unless this becomes a moderation problem.
Wanna look at general stuff on lemmy.world? Sure! Check tankies on lemmy.ml or lemmygrad or hexbear? Alright, who are we to stop you? Wanna porn? lemmynsfw got you covered! And literally anything else on the Lemmyverse is open to you.
If you ever decide you want to branch out, you can try the instance / community browser at https://lemmyverse.net to check out whats out there.
I will say that although it technically doesnt matter what instance you sign up with, sometimes the descriptions aren’t very descriptive at all. Definitely give an instance a browse, to get a feel for the overall vibe, before you sign up.
You can check to see if an instance has been defederated from / by other instances, by entering said instance address at https://defed.xyz/
You can see posts from every instance that your instance has federated with. For example, I, on toast.ooo, can see posts on lemmy.world, lemmy.dbzer0.com, and sh.itjust.works because my instance federates with them.
You can’t see posts from instances that your instance has defederated with, though, nor can you see posts from instances that have defederated with yours. Think of it like cutting one of those thick undersea cables that connect the internet across continents.
There’s a lot to consider when picking an instance; lemmy.world is a good default, so that’s probably why Voyager directed you to it, but don’t be afraid to switch to another instance of you think it’ll serve you better!
Thanks! You all have been very helpful in my understanding of the Lemmy world!
Ignore them. Enjoy yourself. If you’re interested in moving to a different instance later once you learn more about what that means then go for it. There are tools to help you and there’s “no karma” so there’s no reason to not. But there’s no rush to do so.
Don’t worry about it. It’s like Linux enthousiasts talking about distros.
If you get to the point where it matters to you, you’ll look into it then. I’ve been here for more than a year and still haven’t bothered to hop servers.
The others gave you a decent rundown.
I’m certainly not meaning to imply that you did anything wrong signing up with .world, it’s just somethjng to be aware of. This is actually the first time I’ve made this suggestion, I honestly don’t know how most people feel about this, so actually maybe it was a bit much to dump on a newcomer. If so I apologise.
One thing I forgot about was that being on .world means you do miss out on a lot of piracy related stuff if you’re into that.
Also though, you can read about a given instance and its policies and values when you visit it. That often says a lot about the kinds of people you’ll meet there.
Honestly I would like to see a feature that flags if a user’s instance has open sign up.
It’s getting to the point that if someone is still on an open instance, they’re a little sus to me. It’s easier to trust people who come from instances whose policies I agree with.
You know people can just lie though, right? It’s not like that’s the one magical thing that would “fix Lemmy” or something lol.
People won’t usually go to that effort just to troll when there are open instances available, and anyone with closed sign up will be quicker to ban someone who turns out to have lied about the kind of person they are, rather than these giant open instances that don’t seem to give a shit.
And yes, I know it won’t ‘“fix Lemmy” or something lol’, I never said it would. I said it was a feature I would like to see.
Thanks for the info. I’ll stay here for a while and see how everything goes.
I don’t mind assholes as I think that’s just a part of freedom of speech. And I’d rather not get too much moderated content as I think it creates too much of a filter bubble.
I’ve posted this elsewhere, but it bears repeating:
Just use ddg bangs if you use Duckduckgo and you can search reddit directly.
!reddit search termor:
!r search termIt still picks up latest posts related to reddit, it just searches reddit directly instead of searching Bing’s results. It’s that simple.
You can even use a redirect extension like Libredirect in conjunction with this Duckduckgo feature to redirect your search to a privacy respecting frontend like redlib.
DDG is awesome, been using it for years.
I used to sneer at the kids in my class that used it. Must have been fairly shortly after it launched, something like fourteen to fifteen years ago. I’m still grappling with a certain inertia when it comes to switching away from something I have relied on for so long, but I’m coming around to the idea of giving DDG a try at least (irrational as it is, I’ve been reluctant to even try - I suspect out of fear of liking it and having to change).
Past Me would be exasperated that Present Me is even toying with the idea. But then, Past Me had a lot of stupid takes anyway.
I went through the same process that you’re describing. In the end, I gave it a shot and, anecdotally, I feel like I find the things I’m looking for faster than I was with Google and with no shoddy ai summaries.
I like to say that DDG gives you what you searched for while google gives you what it thinks you wanted.
ever wonder how to deal with it? Just switch to something and deal with the consequences of switching, don’t bother thinking about it. There are things worth thinking about, and then there are things worth having experience with, most of the time, having experience is more worthwhile.
I like this one, i tend to do this as well. Possibly discover something new and more geared or useful to you; or else an experience that tells you what doesn’t fit for you.
I’ve gotten really good with ddg searches to where I find much more than I did on Google bypassing the first big payers to Google to stay on top… Even if it’s not relevant to my search. I stuck around with ddg and now as I grown into other area’s of IT like Linux, I noticed there were a lot of great bangs that could get me towards the information I wanted.
Same goes for ddg as for Linux to develop new workflows to keep it fresh and make computing fun again.
yup, it also applies in other areas of life, hobbies, projects, work, whatever, you can apply it basically anywhere and get something interesting out of it.
I think !reddit just sends you directly to reddit and uses reddit’s search engine, which has been infamously bad. Has that changed? It doesn’t seem to be quite the same as appending “reddit” to queries to search for reddit posts, but using better search engines.
Honestly, reddit’s search engine is okay, but yeah it doesn’t get as exact as standard search engines because I think it prioritizes keywords from the post title over comments and also prioritizes most recent posts over subject relevance. That said, the old reddit posts are still going to be accessible via standard not google search engines.
I’ll admit this is somewhat of a bandaid fix, as should reddit keep this deal with google going, eventually this workaround will prove less effective than it currently is.
This workaround just gets you the newest posts related to your query, and otherwise, for older posts, the search term reddit in search engines is still superior. So I don’t know, it’s the best solution I can think of for now.
Libredirect is great, just added it to firefox! I can finally watch all those tiktok links people send me lol
& for anyone else thinking of trying it, if a site won’t load change your default proxy instance :)
Yeah, I do wish they incorporated nitter as well, but otherwise it’s got every privacy respecting frontend and has a lot of public instances in their default listings. One of the best extensions I’ve come across.
FUCK u/spez
Reddit responded: “Only google pays us”. The content is not yours. You built this of naive user base that just wanted to share now these fuckers are taking it as their entitlement. As early an reddit user - fuck that place, I’m still angry.
should fight in court that it’s not reddit’s content. it belongs to the people not steve fuck face.
I’m sure the reddit TOS you agreed to during signup says otherwise…
Legally speaking, the content is theirs.
No, I don’t think so. Just because you put a clause in ToS doesn’t make it legally binding and most precedent is in favor of the original copyright owner.
I’d love to see the precedent, if you don’t mind.
Nonsense.
If someone posts a copyright violation on YouTube, YouTube can go free under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. (In the US.) YouTube just points a finger at the user and says “it’s their fault”, because the user owns (or claims to own) the content. YouTube is just hosting it.
I don’t know of any reason to think it’s not the same for written works. User posts them, Reddit hosts them, user still owns them. Like YouTube, the user gives the host a lot of license for that content, so that they can technically copy and transmit it. But ultimately the user owns it. I assume by the time Reddit made the AI deal they probably put in wording to include “selling a copy of the data” to active they want in the TOS.
Now, determining if the TOS holds up in court is of course trickier. And did they even make us click our permission away again after they added it, it just change something we already clicked? I don’t recall.
Usually any hosting platform has some kind of wording to the tune of “you give us permanent and unrestricted right to use your content however we want”. Copyright is still yours, but you can’t use it against the platform. Applies to social networks, YouTube, Flickr, anything I can think of.
Been on Reddit since like 2009-ish. You completely nailed the point.
That just means the dumbasses will get even less traffic. Way to shoot yourself in the foot, Spazz.
I wish we had a government that functioned. This shot is 100% antitrust. How is it that this shit is let fly.
Antitrust would be the opposite.
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Around here we love the idea of Reddit being totally devoid of life but the fact is it’s still one of the most active public facing sites on the web. The attrition to sites like Lemmy is pretty negligible to the overall Reddit activity and bot AI activity only really affects the largest subreddits which have always been a bit spammy and click batey. The medium and small subreddits are still full of active people. Don’t get me wrong, Lemmy is my daily driver for this content but I won’t pretend everyone fled Reddit for this.
Additionally, exclusivity with Google isn’t necessary just to keep the search results but to prevent their biggest AI competition ChatGPT and their ties to Microsoft from getting access to what is the Internet’s largest database of public facing conversation.
I wonder what kind of contract they went with.
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Social media platform Reddit has struck a deal with Google (GOOGL.O) , opens new tab to make its content available for training the search engine giant’s artificial intelligence models, three people familiar with the matter said.
The contract with Alphabet-owned Google is worth about $60 million per year, according to one of the sources.
For perspective:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-reddit-60-million-deal-ai-training/
In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Reddit said it reported net income of $18.5 million — its first profit in two years — in the October-December quarter on revenue of $249.8 million.
So if you annualize that, Reddit’s seeing revenue of about $1 billion/year, and net income of about $74 million/year.
Given that Reddit granting exclusive indexing to Google happened at about the same time, I would assume that that AI-training deal included the exclusivity indexing agreement, but maybe it’s separate.
My gut feeling is that the exclusivity thing is probably worth more than $60 million/year, that Google’s probably getting a pretty good deal. Like, Google did not buy Reddit, and Google’s done some pretty big acquisitions, like YouTube, and that’d have been another way for Google to get exclusive access. So I’d think that this deal is probably better for Google than buying Reddit. Reddit’s market capitalization is $10 billion, so Google is maybe paying 0.6% the value of Reddit per year to have exclusive training rights to their content and to be the only search engine indexing them; aside from Reddit users themselves running into content in subreddits, I’d guess that those two forms are probably the main way in which one might leverage the content there.
Plus, my impression is that the idea that a number of companies have – which may or may not be valid – is that this is the beginning of the move away from search engines. Like, the idea is that down the line, the typical person doesn’t use a search engine to find a webpage somewhere that’s a primary source to find material. Instead, they just query an AI. That compiles all the data that it can see and spits out an answer. Saves some human searcher time and reduces complexity, and maybe can solve some problems if AIs can ultimately do a better job of filtering out erroneous information than humans. We definitely aren’t there yet in 2024, but if that’s where things are going, I think that it might make a lot of strategic sense for Google. If Google can lock up major sources of training data, keep Microsoft out, then it’s gonna put Microsoft in a difficult spot if Microsoft is gunning for the same thing.
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If we do end up at a point without search engines, where AI does the search and summarizes an answer, what do you think their level of ability to tie back to source material will be?
I haven’t used the text-based search queries myself; I’ve used LLM software, but not for this, so I don’t know what the current situation is like. My understanding is that current approach doesn’t really permit for it. And there are two issues with that:
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There isn’t a direct link between one source and what’s being generated; the model isn’t really structured so as to retain this.
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Many different sources probably contribute to the answer.
All information contributes a little bit to the probability of the next word that the thing is spitting out. It’s not that the software rapidly looks through all pages out there and then finds a given single reputable source that could then cite, the way a human might. That is, you aren’t searching an enormous database when the query comes in, but repeatedly making use of a prediction that the next word in the correct response is a given word, and that probability is derived from many different sources. Maybe tens of thousands of people have made posts on a given subject; the response isn’t just a quote from one, and the generated text may appear in none of them.
To maybe put that in terms of how a human might think, place you in the generative AI’s shoes, suppose I say to you “draw a house”. You draw a house with two windows, a flowerbed out front, whatever. I say “which house is that”? You can’t tell me, because you’re not trying to remember and present one house – you’re presenting me with a synthetic aggregate of many different houses; probably all houses have mentally contributed a bit to it. Maybe you could think of a given house that you’ve seen in the past that looks a fair bit like that house, but that’s not quite what I’m asking you to tell me. The answer is really “it doesn’t reflect a single house in the real world”, which isn’t really what you want to hear.
It might be possible to basically run a traditional search for a generated response to find an example of that text, if it amounts to a quote (which it may not!)
And if Google produces some kind of “reliability score” for a given piece of material and weights the material in the training set by that (which I will guess that if they don’t now, they will), they could maybe use the reliability score to try to rank various sources when doing that backwards search for relevant sources.
But there’s no guarantee that that will succeed, because they’re ultimately synthesizing the response, not just quoting it, and because it can come from many sources. There may potentially be no one source that says what Google is handing back.
It’s possible that there will be other methods than the present ones used for generating responses in the future, and those could have very different characteristics. Like, I would not be surprised, if this takes off, if the resulting system ten years down the road is considerably more complex than what is presently being done, even if to a user, the changes under the hood aren’t really directly visible.
There’s been some discussion about developing systems that do permit for this, and I believe that if you want to read up on it, the term used is “attributability”, but I have not been reading research on it.
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have you tried perplexity? it’s probably the best ai search engine right now although it still misunderstands context sometimes. it’s pretty good at citing its sources though
At least on some smaller subs, there seems to be a suspicious amount of brand new accounts asking one question to get human answers.
It would not surprise me if reddit, or some other service, are seeding to get more LLM-able content. Of course, this might backfire if people start giving stupid answers to eff up the data.If I’m not mistaken, Reddit has actual staff centered around asking questions to get engagement in small communities. Not so much for LLM reasons but to actually grow those communities (and thus edge out competition).
Is there a downside? I’m confused.
Yes. They are making other search engines less useful through what is functionally an exclusivity deal. They are also relying on Reddit to function as useful results since they ruined google search over the past few years. They’ve enshittified their own product and now they are making it everyone else’s problem.
This is bad for anyone who thinks we should be able to search the internet without being locked into google. The door this opens is awful as well - what happens as this practice expands and you suddenly need multiple search engines to find things online? What happens when a search engine cuts a deal with news outlets?
What a mess.
I’m excited for this to start triggering anti-trust legislation
It obviously should, but it won’t, because the US is a capitalist dictatorship masquerading as a democracy. The oligarchy own the government, and the regulators.
But other search engines like Bing are also American capitalist corporations and they don’t want this I’m sure.
letthemfight.gif
“sorry bro, I can’t search that website—it’s not covered by my subscription package”
Google already signaled they want to charge for their trash AI search.
“Would you like to expand your search to include human-created content? Upgrade to Google Advanced* to unlock the power of the human web!”
this is just going to cause indexers to ignore robots.txt
“We always obey the robots.txt”
- A bunch of corporations that have no accountability and plenty of incentive to just ignore it and have all been caught training AI on off-limits data.
Rate limiting could “fix” that unfortunately.
They’re likely blocking user agents too, which I think also doesn’t have legal enforcement (as in DuckDuckGo can just use “Google” unless they said otherwise.
LinkedIn tried blocking scraping that way but as long as the scraping isn’t burdensome it’s basically legal but you can still be bound by TOS and civil claims
https://natlawreview.com/article/hiq-and-linkedin-reach-proposed-settlement-landmark-scraping-case
I wish Lemmy were searchable better. The search function actually works decently well, but it’s not on the same level of actual search engines, it doesn’t seem to look for related/similar terms and also relevancy doesn’t seem right.
I do occasionally find Lemmy in web search results. The platform is not that big (or old), but as long as it sticks around then eventually searchability will improve.
Kagi has a fediverse search option, kinda nifty, wish it wasn’t an either/or situation tho
Google just enshittifying even harder. Reddit results in Google searches are often old and anemic these days.
I used to want Reddit threads to show up in search results. Now I avoid them because they are so often a waste of time. More reason to use Duck Duck Go.
Ah, so Google signed a contract with the company that trained their AI to … (checks notes) … suggest putting glue on pizza.
Sounds like a perfect match.
I’d look at what will be, rather than what is. I think that it’s probably not controversial to say that AI is going to improve; these are early days. The question is to what extent.
If one is to assume that AI will improve very little over time, that ten years from now the kind of responses that you’ll get generated by a computer ten years hence in response to a question will be about the same as they are today, then, yeah, it’s probably an error to commit major resources to AI stuff or to expend resources acquiring training data for it.
But that assumption may not hold.
IMO, another good reason to not use Google!
I work for a different sort of company that hosts some publicly available user generated content. And honestly the crawlers can be a serious engineering cost for us, and supporting them is simply not part of our product offering.
I can see how reddit users might have different expectations. But I just wanted to offer a perspective. (I’m not saying it’s the right or best path.)
Can you use something like the DDOS filter to prevent AI automated scrapings (too many requests per second)?
I’m not a tech person so probably don’t even know what I’m talking about.
I worked with a company that used product data from competitors (you can debate the morals of it, but everyone is doing it). Their crawlers were set up so that each new line of requests came from a new IP… I don’t recall the name of the service, and it was not that many unique IP’s but it did allow their crawlers to live unhindered…
They didn’t do IP banning for the same reasoning, but they did notice one of their competitors did not alter their IP when scraping them. If they had malicious intend, they could have changed data around for that IP only. Eg. increasing the prices, or decreasing the prices so they had bad data…
I’d imagine companies like OpenAI has many times the IP, and they’d be able to do something similarly… meaning if you try’n ban IP’s, you might hit real users as well… which would be unfortunate.
We have a variety of tactics and always adding more
Blocking bots is hard, because with some work they can be made to look like users, down to simulating curved mouse movements from one button to the next if you are really ambitious.
So your saying reddit’s activity analytics can’t necessarily tell the difference between human activity and bot activity?
So the actual number of people using reddit vs bots isn’t very clear. Someone should tell Reddit’s share holders that’s there’s no way to tell if the advertisements are actually being viewed by people, and there’s no way to tell how much the activity reports have been inflated by bots. I bet they wouldn’t like that very much.
Always has been. Technically the server sees no difference in what a browser does vs what a bot does: Downloading files and submitting requests.
