Damn shame about authentication requirements. To avoid botnet, I'd go with complete avoidance, but the data can still be of use.

Avoiding the botnet isn't an all-or-nothing deal. It's not possible to avoid it completely without avoiding technology altogether, but you can at least educate yourself on what companies are most botnet (i.e. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple) and where these companies have a presence (Google can track you through any site that uses Adsense for example, so I would just fire up ublock-origin and block the google.com domain. I would do this, but I need Google unblocked for now, since you have to solve Captchas to post on 4Chan unless you've bought a pass.)