Crawl a Platform Slowly Like a Human to Dodge Bot Detection
Crawl a Platform Slowly Like a Human to Dodge Bot Detection is a cold outreach tactic for getting your first users: To pull data and leads from a hostile network like LinkedIn without tripping anti-scraping, build a Chrome extension that crawls at human speed inside the logged-in user's own session; the click pacing mimics a real person, so it reads as a personal assistant rather than a spider.
It's a strong fit for Dev tools / technical teams, and works especially well for data and lead tools on locked-down social platforms. As a cold outreach play, plan for high effort and expect results to arrive at a steady pace, all grounded in 1 linked primary source.
- Channel: Cold outreach
- Best for: data and lead tools on locked-down social platforms
- Effort: High
- Speed: Medium
- Sources: 1 linked primary source(s)
Why does cold outreach work for this?
Mimicking human behavior in the user's own session keeps you under the rate and anti-bot thresholds that kill server-side scrapers.
The exact steps (4)
The full step-by-step this founder ran, what they posted, where, and in what order, plus the watch-outs, is part of the library.
Sources
- Source — IndieHackers · indiehackers.com