As someone who has tried that effort to do scraping from Fandom, it’s certainly an experience - the HTML is truly nightmarish and definitely written in a way to make scraping as hard as possible (and potentially even programmatically obfuscated, too)

I wonder what the “apex” for all of this is - as in, when do we hit critical mass and the advertisers pull out of this nonsense dumpster fire that is the current internet.

Surely, at some point, if the advertisers know they’re advertising to no one aside from bots on websites that host fake content, then they will pull out and the service providers will have to try and actually make the internet “usable” again? Perhaps I’m being too generous.

Truly Lemmy is where the strong thrive /s