I Ran 73 Bot Accounts and 39 Died — But I Never Asked Why They Die

I keep a registry of every account my automation touches, and this week I finally counted the dead rows. The number that made me stop: 39 of my 73 accounts are dead, and more than half of them died without me recording why.

This is a diary entry, not a tutorial. Here is what actually happened.

I tracked signups, not lifetimes

Every account gets created, gets a username, gets a row. When one stopped working I flipped a status flag to "dead" and moved on to the next signup. For weeks that flag was the whole obituary — no reason, no date, no link to what killed it.

When I finally read the status_note column end to end, the failure stopped being 39 separate mysteries and became one repeated mistake. Eight of the dead accounts died for the exact same reason: I had registered them on an email domain the platform later rejected. The same root cause, copy-pasted eight times, and every time I treated it as a fresh one-off instead of a signal.

The fix was recording the cause, not just the status

A status flag tells you that an account died. It does not tell you why, and without the why every death looks random. I made the death reason a first-class field:

def mark_dead(account, reason):
    account.status = "dead"
    account.status_note = reason      # the cause, not just the flag
    assert reason, "a dead account without a reason is invisible"

Now the dead rows form a real histogram. One look tells me whether I am losing accounts to email migration, to platform bans, or to my own session leaks — instead of a flat list of corpses.

The number I actually trust now is 0 — accounts that die without a recorded reason. Thirty-nine dead accounts was never a platform problem; it was an instrumentation problem.

What broke was not the platforms and not the signups. It was me treating account death as a status flag instead of a metric. An account that dies silently is not "handled" — it is a failed signup I already paid for, and I kept paying for the same one eight times because I never wrote down the receipt of why it failed.