How do bots work?

606 views

Like for example the bots on you tube that either show you some thing in your recommended feed, or to make sure your a human. One, what else can they do like to an extent what is the most a bot can do, and two, if I had my own like if I paid some one and they give me the code for the said bots what could I tell them to do, like for example could they run a business, or do simple tasks?

In: Technology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

A bot is just another name for a computer program. It takes some form of input and performs some action. Reddit bot programs take reddit posts as input and do behaviors like automoderator for too short an answer and removed the answer and sends you a DM

Anonymous 0 Comments

Youtube bots scrap all your google and YouTube data for key terms and duration of things you have done or expressed interest in and then feed it all into an algorithm that will spit out the most likely videos you will click on when you load their pages, largely using cookies.

Anonymous 0 Comments

YouTube bots feed your watch history into different algorithms (like video_recommendation= watched_videos /disliked_topic). They use machine learning and nueral networks for that.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Bots are basically another type of computer program. There are these pieces of code called APIs that allow bots to talk across different platforms and communicate with different webpages, and these APIs drive what bots can do.

So for example, a Twitter bot uses the official Twitter API to interface with Twitter’s servers and post tweets by telling the API what it wants to do. A reddit bot like automod has access to Reddit’s servers and can make comments or posts by also telling the API what it wants to do. Anyone can code a simple Twitter bot in less than a hundred lines of code because the API does that for you.

Some bots however go above and beyond and use advanced algorithms like neural networks. Twitter chatbots use natural language processing to try and provide natural responses that seem human-like. Youtube’s recommendation system takes in your watch history, passes it through a neural network and spits out recommendations as output. While these algorithms aren’t part of the API, they are coded by the programmers and call the API when they are ready to post their output. reCaptcha is not necessarily a bot, it’s more of an embedded API that you can put into your webpage, but it also probably uses neural networks as well.

With the proper API(s) and architectures, a bot can do almost anything from making posts on webpages to running businesses. It ultimately boils down to your use case and how much code you put into it. Like was mentioned earlier, a bot is a computer program. Computer programs can range from simple calculators to entire video games, and the range of a bot’s capabilities is no different.