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What are bots used for? I can think of a few reasons, wrote a scraper/submitter myself in the 90's for a cooperative of subcontractors that was being forced to use an extremely sluggish web app by the big company that provided their gigs.

But I guess there are all kind of purposes, some benign some nefarious, and that they somehow influence the bot operation and detection.

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People are paying $500 for bots used to buy the latest Nike/Adidas/... limited edition sneakers. Or videocards a few years ago (for crypto mining).

It's a whole industry.

> If we consider a user base of ~175 users, and a minimum bot price of 200 euros (175 users x 200 euros), then the bot developers made at least 35K euros (~$37K USD) in initial bot sales.

https://datadome.co/threat-research/inside-sneaker-bot-busin...

Artificial scarcity in sneakers is their design decision. These shenanigans should have zero impact on browser policy.

I thought about building something like that for photographers to get gigs from large real-estate photography contractors who sub-contract the work to independent photographers. Automated tools would benefit the photographers greatly. The benefit comes at the expense of those not using automated tools, so the morality of such a tool is at least somewhat questionable.

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