What I find hilarious about linkedin as I was recently looking for work a few months prior. I whipped up a job search agent to browse the site and others and find jobs that may interest me and match my resume skills.
They intentionally obfuscate the site with all kinds of JavaScript bs which makes it hard for an agent to navigate. All this while the entire site is devoted to praising AI.
Probably originally to prevent scraping. It's clear the same way back in the day sites didn't want you scraping they want you using their interface. This is extremely common, and none of these types of sites offer apis or automation. None of them want ai bots there either. So I don't understand how this whole agentic commerce thing is going to take off.
It could have been done ages ago with simple scripting and a viable api, but it's obvious they do not want you doing that.
So all of a sudden these types of sites are going to allow agent access? We're already seeing this between meta and Amazon.
Agentic commerce is going to be a shit show if it ever happens at all.
Their entire business model is targeted ads and selling overpriced linkedin premium to thought-leader wannabes. If they lose the ads surface, they are dead in the water, so it makes sense to block headless experiences at all cost
HN is an ad platform - it's just maintaining the old style of providing actual value to bribe users into accepting the occasional ad organically, instead of min-maxing for engagement and providing nothing else.
Mentioning LessWrong and 4chan in the same breath made me chuckle, but it's actually a good summary of the modern Internet: to be ad-free, you need to either care very much, or simply not care at all. The middle of the road has been bought, fenced, and you need to pay (with money or attention) to access it.
_superposition_ · · focus · HN ↗
theappsecguy · · focus · HN ↗
_superposition_ · · focus · HN ↗
Grimburger · · focus · HN ↗
klibertp · · focus · HN ↗
Mentioning LessWrong and 4chan in the same breath made me chuckle, but it's actually a good summary of the modern Internet: to be ad-free, you need to either care very much, or simply not care at all. The middle of the road has been bought, fenced, and you need to pay (with money or attention) to access it.