I agree, but I think it’s easier for the community owners to get user to join their discord channel with one click, than having users to sign up for a forum, create an account, confirm the email, post in the right subforum and also deal with spam and forum maintenance. It’s seen as less hassle for admins and users

Was somewhat active in the travel section, but left since 90% are now visa questions on how to get into the schengen area.

This would be a bad approach, because you are essentially trying to brute force your way around a roadblock (no supported open data format) the supermarket intentionally designed. It would be easy for them to block your bot with Captchas, rate limits or IP blocking or just sue you.

You don’t need AI for that. All it takes is some standardized markup like schema.org and a discoverable price list page that can be read and understood by everyone.

We already had something similar with RSS, where you subscribe to your favorite blogs and forums, and the RSS reader on your computer would tell you which sites have new posts, so you don’t need to scan all of them each day. For some reason people stopped using RSS, and instead published their stuff (or notifications about new posts) on Facebook, twitter etc.

The same system could be adapted for (grocery-) price lists. However the big brands would never do that, because then it would be very easy to discover which products suddenly got more expensive.