I Posted to Hacker News, and Then My Website Was Flooded with AI Bot Traffic
I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic
After my feed reader sprinklz.io hit the front page of Hacker News, the site became painfully slow. Logs revealed that nearly half of all traffic came from a single AI newsletter bot hammering the site thousands of times per minute, with other AI crawlers and vulnerability scanners making up much of the rest. I blocked the abusers, added rate limits, and used the experience to make the site faster and more resilient.
I also have this feeling that as software engineering has moved from a discipline of hobbyists and enthusiasts to leaders who increasingly developed through finance or business-minded tracks, we've found ourselves with these major tools that we used to love become both extremely bland and extremely profitable.