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> Why would they need to use rate limits to detect bots? Accounts that hit rate limits are more likely to be bots.

Any ideas on how to do this more trivially than toggling a global rate limit flag?

The post itself says that publicly announcing the policy in advance would be detrimental. The policy is now public and they clearly notify the offender of violation. It probably took bot maintainers less than an hour to update their scripts to pause attempts/switch accounts on first failed request. It's the humans who keep trying. Any heuristic they'd want to apply to detect bots would be applied to action history, tuned to acceptable false positive rates and silently rolled out. This circus doesn't align with the statements at all.

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