why do bots exist and with all the verification methods available, why are they still prevalent?
In: Technology
Social media websites have minimal reason to actually stop bots. In fact it generally helps them increase metrics like traffic and user engagement. Really the only time a website would try to ban a bot if it’s significantly impacting it’s real users.
Reposting bots on Reddit increase “new” daily content, which encourages new users to visit the site. Sure it annoys older users, but they’re likely only using smaller subreddit in the first place.
That said, bots are really hard to kill. For every one method you use to block them, it generally takes a small amount of code to get them to work again. Also, you could put all the verification methods in the world up, but if they equally annoy your users, you’re hurting yourself.
Tldr; It’s cost benefit of the bots impact on the site versus user impact by the verification methods.
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