Begone, Beneficial Botnet

I'm here to talk to humans, NOT machines.

This isn’t difficult to interpret. The first one is overall traffic for the last ninety days, the second shows just an API driven botnet.

Total followers ramped up, and that ramp down at the right is partly me starting to push the botnet booted articles out of the top slots.

It’s much easier to see the botnet’s arrival when just looking at subscribers.

Let’s dial in to just the last thirty days. Here we can see the botnet had done its work and was starting to slow of its own accord.

Conclusion:

I was initially pleased by the burst of attention, but as the focus shifted from what I thought was one international article going viral, into all international articles getting boosted sequentially in reverse arrival order, I became concerned. The increase in likes and subs plays to the gamification angle, but the price is neutering the actual content I generate.

I will not be led off mission by a seemingly helpful botnet. I started playing with the Substack API a couple months ago, assuming I get some other stuff done first this week, I’m going to spider this botnet and see what else it’s doing.