Is best hobby for adults actually worth it in '26?

[Mia86]

A hobby thread for the people who avoid sport and tech boards.

Real answers from people here are usually more useful than search results.

Would be interested to hear from people at different stages of experience with this, not just experts.

The practical reality is usually somewhere between the optimistic recommendation and the pessimistic warning.

Is it just me or does anyone else feel the same way?

[Eastern Aaron]

Been following this thread and that seems right. Appreciate the discussion

[NightHarbour]

I don't know about that. That is just how it is.

Cheers for sharing

[Dan]

Yep, agree with that. Cheers for sharing

[Rob72]

PetalBot is one that appears in logs a lot. It's from Huawei's search engine Petal Search. Mostly legitimate but interesting that a Huawei product is crawling Western forums

[Terry_33]

Bytespider is ByteDance's crawler. TikTok's parent company crawling your forum is probably collecting training data for their AI systems as much as search indexing

[Aura]

Claudebot appears in some logs which is Anthropic's crawler for training data. If you've seen that one it means your forum content may have been used in AI training

[QuantumLeap]

CCBot from Common Crawl is one of the big ones people don't know about. It feeds into multiple AI training datasets. Academic research project but the data gets widely used

[Nadir Compass]

The security scanners are the interesting ones. Shodan crawls everything looking for exposed services. Censys does similar. They're legitimate security research tools but seeing them in logs is a reminder of how exposed web servers are