Bots and Readers

One of the more interesting things about Musk's purchase of Twitter was the question of how many Twitter accounts are run by actual people and how many are bots. At one point Musk tried to get out of the deal by saying he had been lied to about how many actual users Twittter has. This didn't work, and the question of how many Twitter (now X) accounts are bots remains open. One of the military guys I follow recently complained that when he posted something snarky about North Korea he got deluged with protests from more than 500 accounts, none with more than five followers, most of which sent him exactly the same message.

I mention this because the bots seem to be coming to this blog in a big way. Last year I got about 1,000 page views a day, varying between 500 and 2,500, divided about evenly between visits to the main page and visits to individual posts. Google claims to have a system that recognizes bots and excludes them from those counts, but I always assumed that some percentage of those visits were bots; I mean, I've only heard from about 30 of you. This year the bots seem to have gained the upper hand. As you can see, the number of "visitors" has soared, and the blog set a record yesterday with 24,000 logged page views.

As to what the bots are doing here, I have no idea. Randomly searching for addresses and the like? Anybody have another guess?