@lain @i @feld It's not only about journalists, I personally spend significant resources to preserve/dig up stuff as needed, all of which should be trivial if scraping wasn't a (really stupid) taboo. This also hurts the discoverability of posts&accounts.
I guess some would prefer hiding in their little bunkers with their chosen friends (and that's fine), but if we want to have an open social network it's probably the wrong strategy to design things around that concept.