It amazes me when I spin up some random server on a cloud provider and it's immediately getting tons of traffic from bots searching for insecure ssh servers and default WordPress admin credentials and then like. If that's the short of stuff they're counting, I'd believe it. But yeah, it's not like all the commenters on this post are bots.

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.

Not really, as with many others the headline is sensationalist. It's missing the "... on login page attempts for sites that pay for and or use bot protection services."

They'll have memes beyond our understanding!

Was scrolling through Facebook as I still use it to keep in touch with family. 20 sponsored posts for every one actual post. Facebook is terrible.

How are you about to do that on Facebook? I can't even sign up without it asking for my ID

Okay, bot. I believe it, doesn't surprise me at all. Lemmy is also full of bots.

As long as real users exist on the internet, marketing will follow. If centralized social media will be even more of a shithole than already is, then they will slowly target the decentralized. You won't escape marketing.