I'm about to pass 10,000 unique visits for a single day. Why are all the bots swarming to me now? It's weird and disconcerting, yet strangely thrilling. Some part of me knows that most of this activity has to be fake, but some other lorn and lonely part of my brain wishes all of this were real. Current reading: 9,862 9,890 unique visits.
I've had a few 2,000-plus days in a row, but why this?
Guys, I'm not your go-to site for election commentary. Sure, I'll have something to say once we start seeing numbers, but really, there are far better sites out there. Take your botting somewhere else. This is unseemly.
UPDATE: I'm close to 11K views/visits now, with no sign of anything slowing down. I've already passed my 20K views/month goal, and we're not even halfway through November. This is going to be an awesome Thanksgiving. If I wake up Wednesday morning, and the meter shows over 20K visits, I'll post video of me slaughtering a turkey on camera.
UPDATE 2: if this isn't merely a temporary spike but an indication of how big my new audience has suddenly become, well... I guess that means I now have an even bigger platform from which to spread the hate! Yay, me!
Do you see any other manifestations of this surge? Like an increase in comments, for example. I honestly don't grasp what "bots" are, what they do, or what they intend to accomplish.
ReplyDeleteThey never visit me, the selfish bastards!
I think bots visit us all. They serve various purposes ranging from data collection (so your metadata can be sold to others) to, well... data collection. The rough figure I saw a long time ago was that, on average, about 50% of a blog's visits are from bots. So look at your daily traffic stats, cut them in half, and that's about the number of living people really visiting you. In my case, with this current surge, it's hard to believe that any of it is real.
ReplyDeleteThen again, back when I was using SiteMeter (and back when SiteMeter was stable and not prone to wonkiness), I recall experiencing some surges and looking through the visit details, most of which looked legitimate. But that was a different decade, back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and bots were few and far between. Nowadays, you can't trust any measurements of mass human activity. And yes, I include voting in that assessment.
As for other manifestations of the surge—nope. Nada. And that's a good reason to think this is nothing but bots converging on me for no good reason. If I've just offended 10K real people, I apologize.
ReplyDeleteWhere are you going to get a live turkey?
ReplyDeleteOK I’m responsible for a few. Always daily with morning coffee and news feeds. Then maybe one or two during the day when I go for a “Sit Down”. Seems appropriate.
ReplyDeleteCharles,
ReplyDeleteGod will provide.
Curtis,
Thanks, as always, for your readership.