I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
A blog post's server was overwhelmed by a single AI scraper after hitting HN front page.
After a Show HN post for his feed reader Sprinklz.io got 100+ upvotes, Sammy Straus found his site was nearly half its traffic from one AI-to-newsletter scraper polling many times per minute. Other bots included Claude, OpenAI, and vulnerability scanners. He added robots.txt, rate limits, and blocked the scraper. The experience spurred him to improve server performance. The article includes unrelated essays on an LLM-assisted Emacs browser, bad tech incentives, a Clojure library called Deft, and a critique of Nate Silver's use of LLMs for his book.
What commenters are saying
Several commenters noted that heavy bot traffic after an HN front-page hit is not unusual; one said a similar #1 post caused only single-digit CPU/network impact on a cheap VPS. Others asked which scraper was named, with replies declining to identify it. A few defended naming abusers to prevent repeat attacks. Another comment thread discussed blocking entire cloud provider ASNs (AWS, GCP, Azure, Alibaba, Oracle) to stop aggressive scraping and vulnerability scanning, noting that real users sometimes route through those clouds.