It seems like this person wanted to help with AO3 being down in their own way, but somehow decided that scraping the internet for fanworks and hosting them on a new site without asking permission from any of the creators was a good idea.
It seems similar to those people who will dump a 40k LoC Pull Request on an open source project that they vibe coded. Wanting to help, but misunderstanding every step, or like, how to interact with an established group. The article does say that the guy who made the vibe coded site is 17, so I don’t wanna be too hard on him, but maybe he should have reached out to OTW to see if there was anything he could do to help first.
[the website creator] scraped the internet for works to populate the site using “a swarm of AI Agents controlling 40 virtual machines were scraping the internet for all drives, scrapes, and sources,”
Also this kind of stuff is wild because a lot of websites aren’t really built to handle the insane traffic from bot crawlers.
decided that scraping the internet for fanworks and hosting them on a new site without asking permission from any of the creators was a good idea
The thing is, in any fetish and fanfic community there will be a body of works accumulated over the years that contains many classics but the authors are only a nickname. Sometimes there’s an email listed that stopped working decades ago.
The sites that host the works are usually run by enthusiasts. Over the years they lose the incentive to maintain them. Whenever a site goes down and others take its place there’s always a dilemma about what to do with that body of work.
Technically speaking, yes, any site that’s not the site where each author originally uploaded their work is in breach of copyright and/or licensing for those works. On the other hand, if you were to attempt to contact each author and only carry forward the works where you get an answer and permission… only a tiny fraction would qualify, and massive portions of the literature would be lost in each move.
Thats a good point. Things do go down forever and its nice to have backups to preserve history. Though in this case it seems a bit premature because OTW and AO3 are just down afaik, not like, gone gone.
I hate to say this, but we should attack AI, the technology that made this possible.
No, the bigger story is the theft of the stories. Something like this could have been done with any off the shelf CMS, like WordPress.
A03 is an open source platform, you could host an almost perfect clone
true… oh wait, is the code on github or some other VCS? 😄
despite this, the thief decided to roll out their own, AI coded clone? Pathetic search skills!
And it’s clear they have like no infra knowledge. They’re talking about how expensive it is. I’m almost sure they spun up a vercel app because they have no idea what they’re doing and the model is just running patterns. The intelligent thing to do to meet the need for what is almost 100% static content, would have been to get a hetzner dedicated box which gives you unlimited traffic at 1gbps, then pay for cloudflare pro and institute hard long running caching rules, then the vast majority of the server bandwidth and requests come off of the box and hit cloudflare’s edge, which generally allows for unlimited caching.
Or, y’know don’t build this at all since it’s stealing user work. But vibecoders with no engineering experience don’t think that way, they’re all grifters
Damn. Don’t give away the blueprint!
Hetzner you say? Not digitalocean (I know, the Omarchy link) or Vultr?
Cloudflare edge is a fine use of this, though even basic nginx level caching can handle this. Heck, if it’s vercel they can still use some caching in front of it to cool off the use.
But… most coders rarely have infra knowledge, let alone hit-and-run vibe coders, who have neither.
Not surprising, it’s been proven that AI use destroys people’s research skills.
