This also goes way beyond scraping, in the sense of small start-ups doing all kinds of hacks or clever manips to stay within the bounds of a free trial service.
As someone who sees both sides… I don't know what to say. I'm running test landing pages on Heroku with New Relic that pings the sites every minute to ensure the dynes keep spinning and my users don't experience downtime. While I'm careful to stay within fair use, this is at best obnoxious, because if everyone did this, Heroku would certainly need to redefine what's free. From my POV though, I am a bootstrapped entrepreneur and supporting 5 landing pages. I simply don't have resources to pay for a dyno and test everything I have in my head, especially not combined with the many other resources I'd need to start paying for as well.
Or consider the kid in Florida who used Parse' free account for hundreds of thousands of users. [1] (The article was on HN a few weeks ago, this was not it's central point, just something I took away relevant to this comment.)
Part of the cause I think is that we live in a world where we're so used to having things be free, it becomes an entitlement. Another is that all these examples of start-up hacks and hustle stories, we kind of laud, don't we? Everyone talks about how Airbnb scraped Craigslist and got a huge boon that way, but few in critical tones. Should we? Or is that how competition and new products get created (i.e., if the scraping hadn't happened, perhaps Airbnb and the whole sharing economy would be less successful today).
These are philosophical questions, and I don't really have a solution, but they are things to think about.
As someone who sees both sides… I don't know what to say. I'm running test landing pages on Heroku with New Relic that pings the sites every minute to ensure the dynes keep spinning and my users don't experience downtime. While I'm careful to stay within fair use, this is at best obnoxious, because if everyone did this, Heroku would certainly need to redefine what's free. From my POV though, I am a bootstrapped entrepreneur and supporting 5 landing pages. I simply don't have resources to pay for a dyno and test everything I have in my head, especially not combined with the many other resources I'd need to start paying for as well.
Or consider the kid in Florida who used Parse' free account for hundreds of thousands of users. [1] (The article was on HN a few weeks ago, this was not it's central point, just something I took away relevant to this comment.)
Part of the cause I think is that we live in a world where we're so used to having things be free, it becomes an entitlement. Another is that all these examples of start-up hacks and hustle stories, we kind of laud, don't we? Everyone talks about how Airbnb scraped Craigslist and got a huge boon that way, but few in critical tones. Should we? Or is that how competition and new products get created (i.e., if the scraping hadn't happened, perhaps Airbnb and the whole sharing economy would be less successful today).
These are philosophical questions, and I don't really have a solution, but they are things to think about.
[1] http://pando.com/2014/04/30/how-a-florida-kids-stupid-app-sa...