Yeah, and how exactly do you know that was social media troll bots and not like AI training spiders? Do you handle cybersecurity for twitter?

Sorry that you are getting downvoted you are exactly right. People can’t handle being wrong.

It’s pretty fair to assume any ml account is gonna push Russian propaganda, I’m guessing that’s the reason for the downvotes.

No, I manage the website for a cyber security company.

So when the Ukraine war first started, the executive team asked us to block all traffic from Russia to our site. We logged a similar drop in traffic.

This time around, the traffic also dropped but it looked like it came mostly from the UK, DE, DL and SG. It basically went to zero.

We cross reference those IPs and they were all from a VPN.

So you don’t manage a site with any social media component? I don’t think the bots that were crawling your site are the same ones people are saying disappeared from sites like twitter.

It’s not very surprising that banning all Russian traffic resulted in most of that traffic moving to a VPN; the primary method of circumventing geofencing.

Well, I obviously can’t confirm if it’s related, but the day the strikes happened is the day my traffic dropped. It could be a coincidence. A data center could have both the twitter trolls and malicious traffic.

Yeah I suspect the traffic did drop when Yandex’s spiders and all the colocated AI systems stopped crawling your site; data from cloudflare confirms this. It’s not a coincidence; it’s just not what people are claiming it is. You’d probably see a similar drop if someone bombed data centers in the US, but that doesn’t mean they’re running social media troll bots. AI bots are responsible for a lot of traffic these days.

Do you have any information on what user agent strings the suspicious traffic was using? Yandex bots might still use their user agent string even if they were crawling through a VPN. AI bots would probably masquerade as a standard browser, but would be likely try to crawl your entire site unlike natural traffic visiting a few pages. With VPNs in play it’s too difficult to say for sure, though.

Is this the year 2000, we still measuring website traffic?

It’s my job to do so

What a silly, silly comment

What do you even mean?

We’re also still measuring rainfall. Data doesn’t become less valuable as technology progresses…

Visits to a cyber security firm’s website couldn’t be less useful as a metric here

Damn, you’re dumb as hell lol

Hmm, every company monitors their web traffic. That’s standard operating procedure.

It’s just not a useful point of comparison anymore for the purposes it used to be. Does cloudflare track how many million hits I’m getting a day? Yes, but it’s next to useless as a measure for popularity or anything of the sort. You can’t differentiate human and bot traffic with any real degree of reliability, nor is there much meaningful reason to do so anymore with agents acting on behalf of real users. A year ago? Sure, I’d listen to an argument, but now users are bots too. Seeing “bot traffic” or web traffic move is meaningless now. A website with 1000 hits a day could be far more popular than a website with millions a day

We were shown a graph and given a story, people are really gullible. It’s a shame to see a big win completely misunderstood by laypeople.