Hmmm. No data here, just heuristics from my time on HN, but if I were looking for bot accounts, I'd look for:

* a large percentage of posts from the same domain

* a large number of flagged posts

There are also some domains that show up when you are logged in and submit them and don't show up if you view the page anonymously (the entire domain has been added to the killfile). dev.to is one of these.

Submissions of those domains might be automated.

Good luck!