The latter. I was making bots to collect data (for the previously-mentioned thesis) and to make some form of utility bots whenever I had ideas.
I once had an idea to make a community-driven tagging bot to tag images (like hashtags). This would have been useful for graph building and just general information-lookup. Sadly, the idea never came to fruition.
Felt like I was having a déjà vu when watching Tom Scott’s latest video (https://youtu.be/TFpzps-DCb0) but I dug a bit deep to find where I read it. He spoke about the same thing!