>>5360511>How do bots even work?For upvotes, many ways to go about that.
Ideally, if the website allows doing this via API calls, you have a much simpler time requesting API keys and sending calls. Youtube does not.
Effectively, you need to interface like someone using one of the browsers compatible with youtube.
One common solution is to make a bot that can log into youtube, store the credentials, request the video URL, download and scrape the HTML/JS info, determine what kind of programmatic action needs to be performed on which elements of the page to simulate an upvote/downvote, and send that request back to youtube.
Most widely used programming languages have the libraries available to feasibly put together a minimal web client that is optimized to perform a subset of HTML/JS instructions in an efficient way. youtube-dl and Newpipe use this method to grab and download videos (along with some API calls for metadata, when available/convenient).
However, these bots are generally very brittle in nature, and will likely break with every notable change in the youtube page code. Since the task of clicking the button on the page is a relatively simple action, it could be feasible to just run a complete or headless (no GUI) chrome/firefox/etc instance, and use something like selenium to automate a "fuzzier" logic to determining the location of the vote buttons and tell the browser to literally click where you've determined that button to most likely be. Could require less constant revision since you will be interacting with google in the browsers they support, but much less efficient.
Depending on the scale of your operations and the amount of votes you want, you would want to obfuscate the individual runs of the bot(s) using different ranges of IPs, sending different browser fingerprint info per request, and making the time of requests variable. Among other things. Otherwise you risk getting caught in the process and/or getting the votes reverted.
>Do they know how to make gmails?That would probably be a different bot, or just people manually creating accounts and selling them off to the botmaker. Probably best to mix them up with bots with different creation time and metadata as well to throw off high level automated analysis by Google of account activities.
Until Google enforces some sort of unique ID system that has a fixed amount of IDs assigned to one person, either backed up by law or a company which can make your life hell for abusing it, there's not much Google can do other than make it a headache to create accounts en masse programmatically or manually.
Currently I can whip up accounts in a few minutes if I so cared, and I could probably automate and obfuscate it enough to make quite a bit of them without even being a blip on Google's account creation abuse mitigation systems. And that can be learned and worked around as you encounter it.
