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New study finds bots and fraud farms responsible for 73% of web traffic
(interestingengineering.com)
"73% of web traffic" does not mean 73% of comments, posts, content, etc.
It amazes me when I spin up some random server on a cloud provider and it's immediately getting tons of traffic from bots searching for insecure ssh servers and default WordPress admin credentials and then like. If that's the short of stuff they're counting, I'd believe it. But yeah, it's not like all the commenters on this post are bots.
Yeah we had a presentation at work from AWS , they said expect all ports and protocols on any aws server you spin up to be scanned in less than 1min of any instance being created
But yeah, it’s not like all the commenters on this post are bots.
What percentage would you guess that are bots as commenters?
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Holy shit, thinking of all the resources that are just wasted for this shit... Imagine you could just slash all web infrastructures by two thirds.
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":
- Automated personal scripts that many programmers use, these are technically bots. Hell, I use a "bot" to auto-clip digital Safeway coupons
- Moderation bots on sites like Lemmy/Reddit
- Archive efforts
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.
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 auto-clip digital Safeway coupons
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..."
Then the bot goes and gets their little bot scissors
But digitally.
and their bot newspaper,
But digitally.
then clips up some coupons
But digitally.
and hands them to OP.
But digitally.
They said we'd all be living in a VR world by now back in the 90s!
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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.
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Not really, as with many others the headline is sensationalist. It's missing the "... on login page attempts for sites that pay for and or use bot protection services."
That's very good to know and makes the situation a lot less bleak. Thank you for the additional context!
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The web is like a shitty neighborhood now, with stalkers and unpleasant people coming up to you frequently to sell their shady stuff.
Soon there will be content created and consumed entirely by generative "ai," an almost shadow-culture.
Horse shit.
Sandvine still released traffic reports. So does Cable Labs.
Maybe attempted connections, but not volume / tonnage / bytes.
Okay, bot. I believe it, doesn't surprise me at all. Lemmy is also full of bots.
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And I thought porn and cat pictures where responsible for 70% of web traffic... TIL
This is just what the bots are into.
It's why AI porn is so popular all of a sudden, all the bots thought human porn was weird.
70% of my web traffic, anyways.
Yeah dead internet. And I hope this news will kill online marketing for good
As long as real users exist on the internet, marketing will follow. If centralized social media will be even more of a shithole than already is, then they will slowly target the decentralized. You won't escape marketing.
But if 73% of traffic is fake, and they monitor traffic to determine sentiment and marketing strategies, then who are they actually marketing TO?
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Man they caught ~~Google~~ evil actors using Google's infra that pumped up view numbers for video impressions and milking advertisers.
They got swindled millions by the 3ve "scandal".
There's botfarms clicking ads and following brands.
There's warehouses full of smartphones that fake download and fake use apps and fake watch video ads....
At this point it's a money laundering scheme. I refuse to believe that those people responsible are that stupid.
I miss the days when the internet was a fad that most people were apathetic towards.
before we even had search engines, and had to rely on websites listing links to every website.
i hate it when i open my laptop and there’s an error sign blocking the trackpad
Bot wars
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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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