Bot seeking bot

That’s a Venture Brothers reference.  I was pretty bummed when that show got cancelled even though they only made one episode every 3.5 years.  Now I hear they’re making a Venture Brothers movie on HBO.  I’m cautiously optimistic (name of my sex tape).  If it’s just more Venture Brothers, I’ll probably like it.  If the movie is supposed to “wrap-up” everything from the show, I probably won’t.  That never works.  I’m looking at you, Peacekeeper Wars.  Even though it was a financial failure, Serenity is the way to do it. It didn’t put Firefly to rest, it was just an interesting Firefly story.  Sure, it was kind of dumb because they had to narrate and reset everything for people that hadn’t watched the show, but it was good.

“Jeremy, you’re not really keeping your promise to subject us to 70% less content on this blog”.

I know, but it’s not that much more and what I didn’t anticipate (always in motion, the future is) is that I would get mad at DIRECTV and cancel my service with them and since I don’t like any of the streaming services, I watch 70% less TV now.  And further, since my only other time-consuming hobby is running RPGs which I’m not doing currently, something has to give.

“Jeremy, just because you write something doesn’t mean you have to post it.”

Trust me I don’t, I write tons of stuff that I just then delete and everyone’s happy.  But this has to do with my fellow wordpressarians.  Ergo.

I have 169 “followers”.  I’d say at least 100 of them are bots.  Probably more. I assume that most other people have a similar situation, but one time I said something like that to a fellow wordpresser and they got real mad at me.  Maybe all of your followers are legit.  I don’t know.  I mean no offense.  I know that mine are not. 

What I don’t understand is what the value of those bots are.  I understand why dating sites use bots, it makes it seem like there’s people on there you could meet.  And I understand why there are bots on social media, but what are all these fake wordpress accounts for? 

Normally I get zero new followers in a week, this week I had 15 – all of them bots, randomly generated user names with the same picture of a blandly attractive blond lady.  Why are these accounts being created?  Since I don’t try to make money in wordpress, I don’t understand how it works.  For the people that are monetizing wordpress, does it makes sense to have bot followers?  I know bots are used to click-generate ad revenue, is it something like that?

The only thing I know about the financial part of WP is that if I get 75,000 followers, I can get a free merchant account of some kind to sell all the Ela merch I’m obviously creating (I guess that would be a time consuming hobby).  The only way I could ever get that many followers is with bots.  Is that reason enough for someone to make bots?  Seems like if you can make bots, you could come up with a better scam. 

Do they only make bots so they can sell you bot-blocker plugins?  That doesn’t seem very lucrative.  Why would you want to bot-block? Even though I know it’s fake, I can look at that 169 number and pretend I’m cool.  I suppose there’s probably bots that are actually malicious and can do bad shit to your site.  I guess I should look into getting rid of them. 

It’s probably just collateral damage, it’s easier to bot-spam everything everywhere in the hopes of hitting something of value rather than making targeted attacks. 

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