lunasorcery

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

zine from the author of beautifulSoup the web scraping utility, mourning the destruction that has come from what he created, via others using it for bad ends.

Sometimes beautiful Soup is used to do something really important, often as a piece of journalism. (My favorite example.)

But it's also been used as a tool for spamming, doxing, and other things I think are unethical.

And it's often used in ways that make rich people richer. :chart_with_upwards_trend:

Maybe not unethical per se, but not the best use of the power we have as computer programmers.

Beautiful Soup is just a tool.

It isn't good or bad on its own.

But I chose to make this tool instead of a different tool.

I choose to work on it now instead of doing other things.


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

my 2c: I think it's kind of unfair to call it a 'web scraping utility'. it can certainly aid in doing that, but there's lots of uses for it if you're just.. building a web application that uses python, and I used it in my last job for things that had nothing to do with scraping anything from anywhere. I don't see it as more of a web scraping utility than, say, javascript or your web browser itself. If this software didn't exist to parse HTML, a frankly basic bit of tooling that would logically exist given the existence of HTML (if a markup language exists, you need software that can parse it, yeah?) then someone else would have made it, and probably for an extremely good reason/set of reasons

I DO think there is a lesson here about tools, but it doesn't to me have anything to do with beautiful soup itself - every tool that any of us make is a weapon, whether its software, hardware, cultural/social/political tools, etc.