Return to Answer

A few clarifications here.

###The 'diff' here is minor, but not at all unimportant.

By 'minor' - we're simply saying that the scope of the change is small (in size), but not in importance. Think of it like a "minor edit" that makes a clear difference.

It clarifies how we've been executing and operating, while closing loops for bad actors to argue. I'm not sure what else to call it, small? That doesn't quite work either.

We've been doing this for a long time, that's nothing new.

Fun fact, AWS instances are restricted to using our API - they can't load full content pages. Amazon instances were restricted to our API. This was put in place to combat the hordes of SEO scrapers that were misusing our services. Better handling of scrapers in general let us relax this restriction, but it's an example of measures we take to combat evil robots.

We also drop traffic from hosts that send us bats**t-crazy numbers of requests per second without giving it another thought. This happens daily.

If we catch machines up to naughty things, we don't think twice about blocking them at the network level - we must.

But when people have built business models around scraping your profiles and information, they fight back significantly harder when we block them.

We want them to stop. They'd prefer a protracted game of rule-lawyering that puts them in a position similar to this:

They don't deserve that much time and attention from us. We'd rather give it to you. This change lets us block them at every occurrence, while alleviating us of the need to listen to any of the horses**t that ensues.

Think of it like a burglar so delusional that they complain about your door locks interfering with their profits, and thinks it's a totally valid gripe. Yeah.

###This doesn't change how we handle behavioral concerns administratively.

Even spammers identified by our anti-spam system are allowed to read the site. We really hate using lower level blocks because of the risk of blocking actual humans.

This change in no way signifies that we're abandoning our long-held model of giving discussion every possible chance before reaching a series of timed suspensions of varying length. If there's any evidence that someone finds their account valuable for normal use of the site, we'll work with them to keep it. Sometimes this just doesn't work, but that's extremely rare, and nothing new.

Spammers & blatant trolls are zapped on sight, because they fail this pretty critical test of caring about their account and the normal use of the site that it enables.

###As custodians of your trust, we must adapt over time.

This kind of crap needs to stop. We can't really define what 'creepy' is, but that's a pretty darn good example of it. When the actions of third-party bad actors result in folks questioning the trust that they've so graciously put in us, we must take measures.

I hope that's the last time for the foreseeable future that we have to touch that particular document. I don't know that it will be, I can't see into the future - but we will be very open and transparent about new problems that we need to solve and why they're important.

A few clarifications here.

The 'diff' here is minor, but not at all unimportant.

By 'minor' - we're simply saying that the scope of the change is small (in size), but not in importance. Think of it like a "minor edit" that makes a clear difference.

It clarifies how we've been executing and operating, while closing loops for bad actors to argue. I'm not sure what else to call it, small? That doesn't quite work either.

We've been doing this for a long time, that's nothing new.

Fun fact, AWS instances are restricted to using our API - they can't load full content pages. Amazon instances were restricted to our API. This was put in place to combat the hordes of SEO scrapers that were misusing our services. Better handling of scrapers in general let us relax this restriction, but it's an example of measures we take to combat evil robots.

We also drop traffic from hosts that send us bats**t-crazy numbers of requests per second without giving it another thought. This happens daily.

If we catch machines up to naughty things, we don't think twice about blocking them at the network level - we must.

But when people have built business models around scraping your profiles and information, they fight back significantly harder when we block them.

We want them to stop. They'd prefer a protracted game of rule-lawyering that puts them in a position similar to this:

They don't deserve that much time and attention from us. We'd rather give it to you. This change lets us block them at every occurrence, while alleviating us of the need to listen to any of the horses**t that ensues.

Think of it like a burglar so delusional that they complain about your door locks interfering with their profits, and thinks it's a totally valid gripe. Yeah.

This doesn't change how we handle behavioral concerns administratively.

Even spammers identified by our anti-spam system are allowed to read the site. We really hate using lower level blocks because of the risk of blocking actual humans.

This change in no way signifies that we're abandoning our long-held model of giving discussion every possible chance before reaching a series of timed suspensions of varying length. If there's any evidence that someone finds their account valuable for normal use of the site, we'll work with them to keep it. Sometimes this just doesn't work, but that's extremely rare, and nothing new.

Spammers & blatant trolls are zapped on sight, because they fail this pretty critical test of caring about their account and the normal use of the site that it enables.

As custodians of your trust, we must adapt over time.

This kind of crap needs to stop. We can't really define what 'creepy' is, but that's a pretty darn good example of it. When the actions of third-party bad actors result in folks questioning the trust that they've so graciously put in us, we must take measures.

I hope that's the last time for the foreseeable future that we have to touch that particular document. I don't know that it will be, I can't see into the future - but we will be very open and transparent about new problems that we need to solve and why they're important.

A few clarifications here.

###The 'diff' here is minor, but not at all unimportant.

By 'minor' - we're simply saying that the scope of the change is small (in size), but not in importance. Think of it like a "minor edit" that makes a clear difference.

It clarifies how we've been executing and operating, while closing loops for bad actors to argue. I'm not sure what else to call it, small? That doesn't quite work either.

We've been doing this for a long time, that's nothing new.

Fun fact, AWS instances are restricted to using our API - they can't load full content pages. Amazon instances were restricted to our API. This was put in place to combat the hordes of SEO scrapers that were misusing our services. Better handling of scrapers in general let us relax this restriction, but it's an example of measures we take to combat evil robots.

We also drop traffic from hosts that send us bats**t-crazy numbers of requests per second without giving it another thought. This happens daily.

If we catch machines up to naughty things, we don't think twice about blocking them at the network level - we must.

But when people have built business models around scraping your profiles and information, they fight back significantly harder when we block them.

We want them to stop. They'd prefer a protracted game of rule-lawyering that puts them in a position similar to this:

They don't deserve that much time and attention from us. We'd rather give it to you. This change lets us block them at every occurrence, while alleviating us of the need to listen to any of the horses**t that ensues.

Think of it like a burglar so delusional that they complain about your door locks interfering with their profits, and thinks it's a totally valid gripe. Yeah.

###This doesn't change how we handle behavioral concerns administratively.

Even spammers identified by our anti-spam system are allowed to read the site. We really hate using lower level blocks because of the risk of blocking actual humans.

This change in no way signifies that we're abandoning our long-held model of giving discussion every possible chance before reaching a series of timed suspensions of varying length. If there's any evidence that someone finds their account valuable for normal use of the site, we'll work with them to keep it. Sometimes this just doesn't work, but that's extremely rare, and nothing new.

Spammers & blatant trolls are zapped on sight, because they fail this pretty critical test of caring about their account and the normal use of the site that it enables.

###As custodians of your trust, we must adapt over time.

This kind of crap needs to stop. We can't really define what 'creepy' is, but that's a pretty darn good example of it. When the actions of third-party bad actors result in folks questioning the trust that they've so graciously put in us, we must take measures.

I hope that's the last time for the foreseeable future that we have to touch that particular document. I don't know that it will be, I can't see into the future - but we will be very open and transparent about new problems that we need to solve and why they're important.

A few clarifications here.

###The 'diff' here is minor, but not at all unimportant.

By 'minor' - we're simply saying that the scope of the change is small (in size), but not in importance. Think of it like a "minor edit" that makes a clear difference.

It clarifies how we've been executing and operating, while closing loops for bad actors to argue. I'm not sure what else to call it, small? That doesn't quite work either.

We've been doing this for a long time, that's nothing new.

Fun fact, AWS instances are restricted to using our API - they can't load full content pages. Amazon instances were restricted to our API. This was put in place to combat the hordes of SEO scrapers that were misusing our services. Better handling of scrapers in general let us relax this restriction, but it's an example of measures we take to combat evil robots.

We also drop traffic from hosts that send us bats**t-crazy numbers of requests per second without giving it another thought. This happens daily.

If we catch machines up to naughty things, we don't think twice about blocking them at the network level - we must.

But when people have built business models around scraping your profiles and information, they fight back significantly harder when we block them.

We want them to stop. They'd prefer a protracted game of rule-lawyering that puts them in a position similar to this:

They don't deserve that much time and attention from us. We'd rather give it to you. This change lets us block them at every occurrence, while alleviating us of the need to listen to any of the horses**t that ensues.

Think of it like a burglar so delusional that they complain about your door locks interfering with their profits, and thinks it's a totally valid gripe. Yeah.

###This doesn't change how we handle behavioral concerns administratively.

Even spammers identified by our anti-spam system are allowed to read the site. We really hate using lower level blocks because of the risk of blocking actual humans.

This change in no way signifies that we're abandoning our long-held model of giving discussion every possible chance before reaching a series of timed suspensions of varying length. If there's any evidence that someone finds their account valuable for normal use of the site, we'll work with them to keep it. Sometimes this just doesn't work, but that's extremely rare, and nothing new.

Spammers & blatant trolls are zapped on sight, because they fail this pretty critical test of caring about their account and the normal use of the site that it enables.

###As custodians of your trust, we must adapt over time.

This kind of crap needs to stop. We can't really define what 'creepy' is, but that's a pretty darn good example of it. When the actions of third-party bad actors result in folks questioning the trust that they've so graciously put in us, we must take measures.

I hope that's the last time for the foreseeable future that we have to touch that particular document. I don't know that it will be, I can't see into the future - but we will be very open and transparent about new problems that we need to solve and why they're important.

A few clarifications here.

###The 'diff' here is minor, but not at all unimportant.

By 'minor' - we're simply saying that the scope of the change is small (in size), but not in importance. Think of it like a "minor edit" that makes a clear difference.

It clarifies how we've been executing and operating, while closing loops for bad actors to argue. I'm not sure what else to call it, small? That doesn't quite work either.

We've been doing this for a long time, that's nothing new.

Fun fact, AWS instances are restricted to using our API - they can't load full content pages. Amazon instances were restricted to our API. This was put in place to combat the hordes of SEO scrapers that were misusing our services. Better handling of scrapers in general let us relax this restriction, but it's an example of measures we take to combat evil robots.

We also drop traffic from hosts that send us bats**t-crazy numbers of requests per second without giving it another thought. This happens daily.

If we catch machines up to naughty things, we don't think twice about blocking them at the network level - we must.

But when people have built business models around scraping your profiles and information, they fight back significantly harder when we block them.

We want them to stop. They'd prefer a protracted game of rule-lawyering that puts them in a position similar to this:

They don't deserve that much time and attention from us. We'd rather give it to you. This change lets us block them at every occurrence, while alleviating us of the need to listen to any of the horses**t that ensues.

Think of it like a burglar so delusional that they complain about your door locks interfering with their profits, and think it's a totally valid gripe. Yeah.

###This doesn't change how we handle behavioral concerns administratively.

Even spammers identified by our anti-spam system are allowed to read the site. We really hate using lower level blocks because of the risk of blocking actual humans.

This change in no way signifies that we're abandoning our long-held model of giving discussion every possible chance before reaching a series of timed suspensions of varying length. If there's any evidence that someone finds their account valuable for normal use of the site, we'll work with them to keep it. Sometimes this just doesn't work, but that's extremely rare, and nothing new.

Spammers & blatant trolls are zapped on sight, because they fail this pretty critical test of caring about their account and the normal use of the site that it enables.

###As custodians of your trust, we must adapt over time.

This kind of crap needs to stop. We can't really define what 'creepy' is, but that's a pretty darn good example of it. When the actions of third-party bad actors result in folks questioning the trust that they've so graciously put in us, we must take measures.

I hope that's the last time for the foreseeable future that we have to touch that particular document. I don't know that it will be, I can't see into the future - but we will be very open and transparent about new problems that we need to solve and why they're important.

A few clarifications here.

###The 'diff' here is minor, but not at all unimportant.

By 'minor' - we're simply saying that the scope of the change is small (in size), but not in importance. Think of it like a "minor edit" that makes a clear difference.

It clarifies how we've been executing and operating, while closing loops for bad actors to argue. I'm not sure what else to call it, small? That doesn't quite work either.

We've been doing this for a long time, that's nothing new.

Fun fact, AWS instances are restricted to using our API - they can't load full content pages. Amazon instances were restricted to our API. This was put in place to combat the hordes of SEO scrapers that were misusing our services. Better handling of scrapers in general let us relax this restriction, but it's an example of measures we take to combat evil robots.

We also drop traffic from hosts that send us bats**t-crazy numbers of requests per second without giving it another thought. This happens daily.

If we catch machines up to naughty things, we don't think twice about blocking them at the network level - we must.

But when people have built business models around scraping your profiles and information, they fight back significantly harder when we block them.

We want them to stop. They'd prefer a protracted game of rule-lawyering that puts them in a position similar to this:

They don't deserve that much time and attention from us. We'd rather give it to you. This change lets us block them at every occurrence, while alleviating us of the need to listen to any of the horses**t that ensues.

Think of it like a burglar so delusional that they complain about your door locks interfering with their profits, and thinks it's a totally valid gripe. Yeah.

###This doesn't change how we handle behavioral concerns administratively.

Even spammers identified by our anti-spam system are allowed to read the site. We really hate using lower level blocks because of the risk of blocking actual humans.

This change in no way signifies that we're abandoning our long-held model of giving discussion every possible chance before reaching a series of timed suspensions of varying length. If there's any evidence that someone finds their account valuable for normal use of the site, we'll work with them to keep it. Sometimes this just doesn't work, but that's extremely rare, and nothing new.

Spammers & blatant trolls are zapped on sight, because they fail this pretty critical test of caring about their account and the normal use of the site that it enables.

###As custodians of your trust, we must adapt over time.

This kind of crap needs to stop. We can't really define what 'creepy' is, but that's a pretty darn good example of it. When the actions of third-party bad actors result in folks questioning the trust that they've so graciously put in us, we must take measures.

I hope that's the last time for the foreseeable future that we have to touch that particular document. I don't know that it will be, I can't see into the future - but we will be very open and transparent about new problems that we need to solve and why they're important.