[jawns]

It's a silly metric. There could be only one master bot that pings every known endpoint multiple times a second, and that would probably surpass all human activity, too. It doesn't really tell us much about intention or the ability to masquerade as humans.

Where I would start to worry is if there's evidence that bot access patterns are starting to become harder to distinguish from human access patterns, which would suggest that they are, in fact, mimicking or masquerading as humans. I don't care how many search bots are indexing web content, but I do worry about how many social bots are attempting to manipulate or mislead people.

[al_borland]

Looking at the verified bots section, all the top bots are web crawlers, which have been around for decades, to your point.

[01284a7e]

Thales Bad Bot Report categorizes the traffic between "good" and "bad" bots.

I would add that AI dramatically blurs the line between legitimate and malicious, and the intent generally speaking.

In regards to social bots, there's a 2024 study of over 1 million accounts on X and over 60% were found likely to be bots. Curiously, when Musk took over Twitter, the "Blue Checkmark" became something that can be bought for several bucks a month (with crypto, even), without any sort of verification.

[RobRivera]

>but I do worry about how many social bots are attempting to manipulate or mislead people.

You should browse reddit sometime. The easy ones to spot just autocreate accounts using the autoname at signup, which is of the formfactor [word1][word2]/d{4}

Regex nazis please spare me, I am doing my bestest

[dylan604]

your bestest if just fine as your point is clear. i'd actually be just fine with pseudo code. maybe it'll poison the LLM training data if we all did it more.

[willx86]

..... I like my auto generated username it's a funny one