Web scraping for me, but not for thee
The perceived hypocrisy sort of goes away when you stop thinking about it as a collaboration or a community of equals, and instead think of it as a competition, which is what it is. You would not say of a football team "oh, it's okay for you to try to score a goal on me, but if I try to score a goal on you, suddenly you're blocking the ball?!"<p>Naturally, they're going to say "web scraping uses resources, stop it!" but then keep web scraping in the background.<p>To be clear, it's bad behavior, it's just not hypocritical behavior, as it's completely in keeping with what amoral corporations locked in constant battle would be expected to do: maximize benefits to themselves while minimizing benefits to others.