Bots Represent 64% Of Internet Traffic

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Do you ever get the feeling like you could be interacting with an AI or perhaps the number of likes on a post seems way too inaccurate? 64% of internet traffic in 2021 came from bots so let’s talk about what that means and what the future holds.

This is my 505th episode/article. I put a great deal of work into this content so if you find it valuable, please do like, share, comment and subscribe!

What is bot traffic and why does it matter? - https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-bot-traffic/
Bot traffic could be anything from a fake social media account to a click farm to algorithmic trading, to fake web traffic, to malicious hackers. Bots can do a lot of things, but you’ll typically find them doing simple tasks like Facebook’s feed fetcher bot to pull previews for the feed. This bot alone makes up a huge portion of internet traffic and is an example of a good bot. But even in a way, a good bot can be bad because it can act in the wrong way or simply overwhelm smaller websites. Most bot traffic comes from Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure which are two massive public cloud systems.

There are several reasons why bot traffic is so important to recognize:
• The majority of trading is algorithmic and done by bots.
• The majority of trading volume on exchanges are made up by bots – Forbes reported as much as 93% on some exchanges in 2018
• Bots run the majority of moderation and censorship programs.
• Bots make up the majority of the internet – aka you don’t know what’s real since more is fake than real.
• The percent of bad bots are increasing.
• Bots can heavily influence and skew data to almost entirely negate the accuracy of online research studies, most notably in healthcare related studies.
• The perception of public consensus and sentiment online is completely fictional.
Let’s take an example scenario. Very important breaking news is shared. This new is against the mainstream narrative so it is flagged, mass disliked, and mass commented on saying things like “fake,” “lies,” “this is written by a bot” (ironically). The point is that with bots, any opinions formed by community consensus and not by directly consuming the content itself will result in a distorted reality. This is the reality today. Framing, cutting clips, not actually showing the clip or image and telling you what happened or what it depicts. YouTube removing dislikes, auto removing comments, etc., the list goes on and on.
The recent plummet in stocks and crypto could just simply the mass majority of trading that is done by bots that happened to catch a trend and follow it with a cascading effect with futures liquidations.

Algorithmic Trading:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/yoavvilner/2018/11/24/all-there-is-to-know-about-bots-role-in-cryptocurrency-trading/?sh=7ac12a6a4fc3
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/13/death-of-the-human-investor-just-10-percent-of-trading-is-regular-stock-picking-jpmorgan-estimates.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/05/sell-offs-could-be-down-to-machines-that-control-80percent-of-us-stocks-fund-manager-says.html
https://blog.quantinsti.com/growth-future-algorithmic-trading/
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4230982-algo-trading-dominates-80-percent-of-stock-market
https://therobusttrader.com/what-percentage-of-trading-is-algorithmic/
https://www.sec.gov/files/Algo_Trading_Report_2020.pdf
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/algorithmic-trading-market

Below are several references to research reports, studies, and reviews of those studies on bot traffic mainly focused on 2020 and 2021:
2012-2016
https://www.statista.com/statistics/670782/bot-traffic-share/
2020 – 41%
https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2021/04/13/2209196/35210/en/The-Pandemic-of-the-Internet-Imperva-Research-Labs-Reveals-Bot-Traffic-Climbs-to-Record-High-in-2020.html
https://www.jmir.org/2020/10/e23021/
https://www.imperva.com/blog/bad-bot-report-2021-the-pandemic-of-the-internet/
2021 - 64%
https://www.barracuda.com/bot-threat-report
https://www.digit.fyi/two-thirds-of-internet-traffic-is-now-made-up-of-bots/

Do you think 64% of the internet is made up of bots? Do you think it will keep increasing? Have you ever not been sure if you were interacting with a bot? Let me know what you think about this in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe!

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice and is purely for entertainment purposes. What you see, hear, or read is my personal opinion, and any statements made are based on my views and should not be misconstrued as fact. My crypto portfolio may or may not be simulated

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!PIZZA

The number you gave seems low. Googlebot looks at all pages. There are several other webcrawlers. I get hundreds of thousands of hits from bots searching for security holes on the sites I monitor. Its not difficult to create a bot that calls a thousand urls.

   for (i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
     // call web sites
   }

A brute force login script might run millions of times a day.

passwordArray /// an array with 1 million username/password combos

for each userName, Password in passwordArrayy {
  example.com/login?u=userName&p=password;
}

Of course, the number comes down to how one measures bots what they are doing. Speaking of bots, I told the Pizza bot to give you a token.

!PIZZA

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yeah... its a bit hard to technically explain to the general public what a bot can be right? And also how to limit the definition of a bot by itself... for that matter, any DNS resolution could be a bot just for that matter.

I am exaggerating but you get the idea.

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its a bit hard to technically explain to the general public what a bot can be right?

I suspect that it is even harder explaining the concept to a technologist.

When I examine web logs, I try to figure out which hits are from bots and which are from users. I will often find a group of computers hitting my servers with hundreds of thousands of requests.

That's why I said 64% might be low.

Here on HIVE we can look at HiveBlocks.com or he.dtools.dev

After I read your post, I looked that transactions in my account and realized that most of them come from bots. Since this is your post, I will link to your accounts.

https://hiveblocks.com/@forykw

and

https://he.dtools.dev/@forykw

When we write posts and upvote, the activities clearly start with humans.

For each posts and update, there are multiple curation rewards.

The curation rewards come seven days after publishing a post. In this report, would one classify the curation rewards as a bot?

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(Edited)

No... in this case the act of receiving the reward no... at least. Because that is already programmed to happen since its essence (on HIVE code), but eventually, you will have to claim for it to become liquid/staked, and that one witch is from itself another transaction, it can be either human or done by a bot that has authority to use your posting key.

The vote that the bot does (aka broadcast), is another one.

So, yeah... I see why you said that, but I was just trying to put myself in Scott shoes and try to define the limit of the "bot" to explain to masses... which majority of them might not even understand what I just explained above.

I can provide you with examples if this is not clear.

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Since HIVE is transparent we can see all of the transactions. We can also see how difficult it can be to cleanly separate the transactions that result from human activity and those that are purely programmatic.

This problem appears in a number of real world scenarios. For example, some companies tried selling advertising based on click traffic. Scammers quickly became adept at flooding CPC campaigns with fake clicks. The same happens with CPM marketing as the scammers know how to flood ad campaigns with fake page views.

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(Edited)

In that context, that problem quickly gets sorted/reduced in HIVE by the fact of anyone being able who is authorized to use your keys.

For example, I am trusting these to handle my posting key functions on my behalf.
image.png

If there are no authorizations, then it means either the owner of the keys given them to someone else, foolishly breaking its security on their own, or it's savvy enough to create its own scripts in secure places where no other entities have access to the keys.

So yeah, without a proper security methodology adopter of ownership and authority delegation transparently visible, it's very hard to separate those scenarios. But when specific authorization is visible (case of HIVE), contrary to other social media, it becomes easier to investigate or estimate what is a "robot" or "human" interaction. This is why HIVE will eventually show the world, how much this technology will revolutionize social interaction and censorship control/absence.

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We actually saw this when Australia was having all those super intense fires in early 2020. People kept asking me if they were started by arsonists, which was super confusing to me because Australia always has bush fires in January... but a University found that 300 bots were pumping out constant misinformation... with the comments all being unique, but extremely similar.

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I just found this post because of the Hive link shared on Twitter, keep up the great job Scott

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