this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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New study finds bots and fraud farms responsible for 73% of web traffic::undefined

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 11 months ago (16 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 11 months ago (12 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (6 children)

I use a "bot" to auto-clip digital Safeway coupons

How?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Thank you for giving the first real answer. As funny as the others were, I was in fact looking for a legitimate understanding of how to do this 🙃

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