this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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I work in bot protection and it's a sound idea but doesn't really work in practice. As long as there's more than 1$ of value to be gained it's worth it for the bot makers.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a "cat and mouse" sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.
I'll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you're likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you're likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they're working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
Perpetual growth/engagement statistics?
How true is the dead internet theory, in your view?
Er du måske en robot??
Nei, jeg er kjøtt og blod og stål og smøreolje som deg
Hmm, jeg tror desværre jeg består af et 100% syntetisk keramisk bomuldsprodukt...
More eyeballs.
Enough updoots or retweets and other algos pick up on it. Some random twitter discussion ends up on BuzzFeed, YTers start making influencer vids, and Reddit / Lemmy repost bots.
Do this enough and it'll gain traction. Now everyone is talking about your stupid fuckin Stanley mug, corporate rumor,or political talking point.
And this can be automated end to end, 24/7, by market and keyword, will real time feedback as to how well it's doing via upvotes, shares, likes, or even data mining emails and convos via Gmail or WhatsApp.