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Okay, I think I found the "scout" bot account that followed me. I blocked it early this morning and haven't received any more bot follows since then (before I was getting two to three every 12 hours).

To explain, in the previous bot plague it was discovered that individual upticks in bot follows happened after you were followed by a scout account. These were a bit difficult to find because they weren't empty accounts; they often (but not always) have default avatars, but sometimes had a tagline and background, convincing usernames, and had just enough reblog activity that a cursory scroll through their account wouldn't get them instantly blocked. They were really difficult to suss out unless you didn't have many followers and could inspect every recent follow. The telltale signs for the ones I always find are that:

They don't have anything in common with my interests, even though they follow me,

They never tag or comment, or the tags are suspiciously generic with no personality or system,

They followed me without any interaction (a human *usually* tends to like/reblog a bunch of your stuff before following)

(Had to see this on desktop) Their reblog activity is centered around the date they followed me, and does not extend far beyond that.

If you have the time and inclination, look through your followers list (gonna say since the Twitter exodus started, so late October/early November), on desktop if you can, and inspect your recent followers.

Target in sight

tfp animators man.. /pos

Alright this is rly sad but here goes. I started doing my once-in-awhile bot purge from my followers list. And. I used to be able to just quickly scan and see the bots. They were the ones with default icons and generator-sounding names like "noun-girl-827". And if you weren't sure, you could click on the blog and it would be immediately obvious it was a bot because there's either just bad porn click bait, or nothing there.

Well. This time I had to give up immediately because I got like ten followers down the list and was having immense trouble figuring out who's a bot and who's real. Never ever used to see this but like 5/10 of the first few followers I checked on had just totally empty blogs. It wasn't until I'd already blocked 2 - assuming bots bc empty blogs - that I thought to check if they had any likes. And bam! There it was. All of their user activity.

We have people on this website now who have never reblogged a single post.

Y'all, I'm sure you're sick of seeing "you have to reblog thing" but you literally have to reblog things. That is how this website works. You understand that, right? How do you think the post you hit "like" on got in front of you? It wasn't because you liked enough things and Tumblrs algorithm figured out what you like enough to hand it to you. It's because you followed someone, a human person, who reblogged that post. And it came from another person who also reblogged it.

You are killing this website by refusing to interact with it in the way that makes it better than the other websites you ran from to come here.

Anyway, I'm sure you're all nice people, but I'm not going to play the "bot or not" game if you have an empty blog I'm going to block you.