The company I worked for used to use SSR which was fine but the web scraping was relentless and the “free” thing we offered was relatively computationally expensive. Eventually we moved to SPA and bought into the CloudFlare protection racket. This didn’t stop it of course but it made the low effort scrapers have to use a browser and hopefully bumped their costs us The advent of the LLM crawlers has made everything worse as well.
We got a bunch of complaints when we moved to the JS only site saying we were ruining the Internet and while I didn’t disagree the practicalities make it a requirement.
We got a bunch of complaints when we moved to the JS only site saying we were ruining the Internet
From my perspective, sites which move to javascript-only cease to be publicly accessible and essentially remove themselves from the internet. I do understand the necessity to do something about the scrapers, but going javascript-only is basically death of the site.
It’s also just practicalities of the industry. You can write interactive elements on a site with minimal JS and some guys blog which could just be an MD file shouldn’t need 10mb bundles of JS. However when you do need to shift more in to the application on the web side of things and you need front-end developers it’s far cheaper and easier to source spa devs, there is just more of them.
The company I worked for used to use SSR which was fine but the web scraping was relentless and the “free” thing we offered was relatively computationally expensive. Eventually we moved to SPA and bought into the CloudFlare protection racket. This didn’t stop it of course but it made the low effort scrapers have to use a browser and hopefully bumped their costs us The advent of the LLM crawlers has made everything worse as well.
We got a bunch of complaints when we moved to the JS only site saying we were ruining the Internet and while I didn’t disagree the practicalities make it a requirement.
From my perspective, sites which move to javascript-only cease to be publicly accessible and essentially remove themselves from the internet. I do understand the necessity to do something about the scrapers, but going javascript-only is basically death of the site.
It’s also just practicalities of the industry. You can write interactive elements on a site with minimal JS and some guys blog which could just be an MD file shouldn’t need 10mb bundles of JS. However when you do need to shift more in to the application on the web side of things and you need front-end developers it’s far cheaper and easier to source spa devs, there is just more of them.