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New study finds bots and fraud farms responsible for 73% of web traffic
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Technology
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I really hate the phrase "bots" because it gives the appearance that they're all useless and malicious. I guarantee you they lumped in the following extremely valid uses of "bots":
Are AI chatbots bots? If they use a loose enough definition all this means is humans utilize fuck tons of automation over the Internet, both programmers and not.
How?
They go, "hey bot, would you please clip me some Safeway coupons?"
Then the bot goes and gets their little bot scissors and their bot newspaper, then clips up some coupons and hands them to OP.
It's a pretty endearing sight.
"Father, what is my purpose?"
"You clip coupons."
"... Oh my god..."
But digitally.
But digitally.
But digitally.
But digitally.
They said we'd all be living in a VR world by now back in the 90s!
I had some good times with your mom last night. But digitally.
TamperMonkey (I've been told to use ViolentMonkey instead as TamperMonkey isn't open source) and the script here. Then you can run a script to periodically log into your account in a headless browser and click the button. Unfortunately there's no coupon API so this is the best solution I could think of.
Why do you think that such bots cause a relevant amount of traffic?
Because they're used absolutely everywhere, and often back large portions of Internet infrastructure. I'm a backend developer and we have thousands of "bots" running at any given time to keep our systems going. They generate traffic equivalent to thousands of people and are maintained by a 3 person dev team. This is for a relatively small company. When I was at AWS the scale was much more unfathomable.
I use a bot to convert source code into executable binaries.
That's a very good point, thanks!