Comment by Retr0id
3 days ago
This does assume that scrapers are smart, and often they're really not. They have infrastructure for scraping HTML from webpages at scale and that is the hammer they use for all nails. (e.g. Wikipedia has to fight off scraper traffic despite full archives being available as torrents, etc.)
In this case I agree though, they're all spammers and/or "clout farmers", or trying to make an account seem more authentic for future scams. They want to generate follow notifications in the hope that some will follow them back (and if they don't, they unfollow again after some interval).
100%. I ran a job board where we provided a nice machine readable XML feed of all of our jobs, but we had bots that insisted on using the standard search box. Searching by city using an alphabetized list.
Geographic search to was the most expensive thing they could have done and no matter what we did we couldn’t get them to use the XML feed.
I even tried returning a link to the feed when we detected a bot. No dice. They just kept working around the bot detection.