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UnknownQTY t1_j2qni13 wrote

Reply to comment by DrifterInKorea in TIL that bots 🤖 drive ~40% of all internet traffic. by kkoolook

Yeah and that what makes using the term “bot” a bit of a misleading term here. When the average person hears “bot” online, they equate this with an account pretending to be human.

The technical definition of bot used here is basically any automated process, most of which don’t even interact with real users, other than passive consumption of user data.

That’s not really a bot to most people.

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DrifterInKorea t1_j2qotpn wrote

Yes and it's hard to detect true bots (I mean automated processes that do not just follow links like wget) because even a simple curl call can spoof its signature and become "human" from an external observer.

So its both ways :

  • on one side you have users that may interact with tools that will cause the traffic to be labelled as "bot".
  • on the other side even simple scripts (bots) can alter their behavior to make it look like they are humans (added noise and delays to mouse cursor position, randomizing ips, using various user agents, etc...) and be labelled "human".
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