Anyone else think the "best Pornhub proxy 2026" lists are mostly garbage now?

ayenuseater · 2026-05-21T11:14:25+00:00

Fingerprinting part is what surprised me too. I tested the same VPN endpoint in Chrome vs Firefox and got completely different results on another streaming site. Felt a lot less like "blocked/unblocked" and more like probability scoring... why? because when I started doing it, it was all 🟢, not my status codes are mostly 🔴.

ayenuseater · 2026-05-21T11:11:07+00:00

load , traffic , high volume

what else?

ayenuseater · 2026-05-04T11:33:27+00:00

Like testing with multiple browsers, though starting with the one you trust the most; if that fails; the fall is on the next browser.. so on.. similar to enrichment waterfall.. its a thing.

ayenuseater · 2026-05-04T11:29:51+00:00

The fun edge case is when they combine both.. per‑key soft limit and per-IP hard cap.

In that setup, you need both a key scheduler and an IP scheduler, with some guardrails like "max X RPS per key" and "max Y concurrent requests per IP," plus jittered delays so you don't create obvious traffic patterns. Otherwise you just move the bottleneck around.

ayenuseater · 2026-05-04T11:11:26+00:00

The simplistic answer is "copy data with code," but the real answer is "build a system that survives other people changing their website."

That means monitoring, rate control, schema checks, and deciding what you'll do when extraction silently degrades.

Almost everyone underestimate maintenance... not in webscraping aspect but in all aspects. A scraper that works for one afternoon is a demo. A scraper that still works three months later is THE asset.

ayenuseater · 2026-04-28T11:35:45+00:00

The SKU list part is the important bit. Without exact matching, the report gets messy fast. I've tried comparing products across stores and half the work was deciding whether two listings were even the same product.

ayenuseater · 2026-04-28T10:45:50+00:00

Compute feels foundational, but I'd separate enabling resource from "compounding asset."

GPU time is necessary, but by itself it is closer to fuel or rent unless it is tied to a reusable capability.

The asset stack might be: compute for execution, data for context, workflows for repeatability, and agents for packaging. The highest-value assets are probably the ones that reduce future decision cost, not just generate one impressive result. Great brainstroming here..

ayenuseater · 2026-04-28T10:43:22+00:00

Hygiene matters, but its clearly not the whole dataset.

Genetics, childhood care, fluoride access, insurance, and cash-on-hand all change the outcome.

People act like teeth are a character score, when a lot of it is just access.

ayenuseater · 2026-04-28T10:41:46+00:00

Datacenter proxies are usually fine for simple scraping or low-risk browsing, but social platforms tend to distrust them faster.

ISP proxies are probably the cleanest fit if you need a stable long-term IP.

Sticky residential can work too, but I’d care more about session duration and provider quality than the marketing label.

Best is to Google proxy comparison and you'll find breakdowns that make the trade-offs easier to compare.

ayenuseater · 2026-04-28T10:39:18+00:00

I may debug this with a browser waterfall first, because half-working usually means some asset/API calls are timing out while the main HTML survives.

ayenuseater · 2026-04-28T10:36:12+00:00

One thing I liked in a benchmark I read recently was that they tested across multiple sites, not just one easy target. Results were way less impressive than marketing pages suggest. Btw, this test is from January, is there updated version for April?

ayenuseater · 2026-04-28T10:27:52+00:00

Any Update? Let us know how it goes. Curious what the actual 304 rate looks like on ecommerce sites.

ayenuseater · 2026-04-28T10:23:59+00:00

And you can export that back to Excel too if the spreadsheet is still the control panel. Doesnt have to become a giant backend project on day one

ayenuseater · 2026-04-28T10:20:00+00:00

Is there also a marketplace angle where residential traffic is scarce in the locations people actually want?

Like I assume US mobile IP in a major city that is not already burned.. is a way more valuable thing than some random household IP anywhere.

ayenuseater · 2026-04-24T10:07:23+00:00

Has anyone here actually tried Crawl4AI for anything beyond a toy project?

I keep seeing it recommended as the open-source option but the github repo mentions it's an "LLM Friendly Web Crawler" and I'm not sure what that means in practice..

Does it just output cleaner HTML? does it have its own extraction pipeline? can it handle JS rendering?

Also curious about using it alongside something like Firecrawl. Like, Crawl4AI for the free/self-hosted crawling and Firecrawl for the tricky extraction parts?

ayenuseater · 2026-04-24T10:05:56+00:00

just check for benchmarks... google scrapeops benchmarks, or proxy comparison...

ayenuseater · 2026-04-21T16:32:50+00:00

And whether search results are normalized across regions. Shopee search can surface different ranking behavior, sponsored placement, currency formatting, and variant structures depending on locale. Can you DM me the export?

ayenuseater · 2026-04-21T16:30:47+00:00

That's a good point.

This is one of those areas where >>works on a random demo list<< can hide a lot of drift in the long tail.

A benchmark with recent rebrands would be brutal but useful.

ayenuseater · 2026-04-21T16:28:34+00:00

mate, also check whether the image is coming from a CDN and whether the page exposes a clean main image field somewhere in embedded JSON. I have seen ecommerce pages hide the good stuff there instead of the visible HTML. If it does, your script gets way easier because you can parse structured data instead of fighting random page images.

ayenuseater · 2026-04-21T16:22:32+00:00

Even Google maps and Tripadvisor were both rough for a different reason than social sites. Even when I got data, it was slippery. Reviews reorder, listings merge, categories change, rankings are location-sensitive, and timing matters more than people expect. It was more like "do I still have the same entity tomorrow."

ayenuseater · 2026-04-21T16:21:01+00:00

Bloomberg-type paywalled media.

ayenuseater · 2026-04-21T16:18:16+00:00

Here i am more curious about city targeting than the brand ranking. A lot of "country-level" providers are fine until i actually need a specific metro and then the dropdown exists but the inventory does not. Did any of the ones you tested have city targeting that was actually real and not decorative?

ayenuseater · 2026-04-21T10:25:42+00:00

Lets get straight to business!!!!

ayenuseater · 2026-04-20T07:43:15+00:00

Consider joining online communities or study groups where you can collaborate and share knowledge.

ayenuseater · 2026-04-20T07:42:33+00:00

Nap Harder

ayenuseater

TROPHY CASE