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"The "Dead Internet Theory" is a concept suggesting that the internet has largely been abandoned by humans and replaced by non-human activity. It posits that most online content, interactions, and engagement metrics are driven by bots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, creating the illusion of a vibrant, human-driven web."
Most every human I know is on the internet but they are increasingly not liking it and increasingly only using it as necessarily.
Nobody in here actually exists. I am the only real person. /s
Yes and no. it depends.
Perhaps I'm wasting my time... but whatever.
If we count non-human traffic then automation/bots were always dominant. Servers check each other's availability all the time. Scrapper bots existed way before dead internet theory and many services online were just a bot polling some servers repeatedly just to show you collected and processed data. Nothing new.
If we count only bots that pretend to be human then this is more of a modern issue. And it's a source of sudden growth of interest in invigilation among political elites. After all most of internet-based economy is built on assumption that sites can show advertisements to humans. And often are paid per showing. If those views turned out to be just bots, nobody would want to pay for them. That would pretty much be another financial bubble to pop around the internet, maybe even bigger than AI-bubble itself. Of course any legislated methods of verifying if someone is human will be cracked within days and bots will be certified as humans faster than humans themselves. This is what we learned from all anti-piracy tech spending and there is no reason to hope that human-verification will be any better.
In my personal opinion internet was never human-driven. It was always humans surfing on waves of bots working in unison to keep the thing working. It's the bots that pretend to be humans who are the problem both for people and for companies. And companies will rather push real humans out of internet than reign the bots in.
yes
Major platforms already have a large portion of bot content. Online articles in Google searches are mostly bots. It's trending upwards but there's still a lot of human created content left. I would stay away from big tech social media to avoid bot content.
This really depends on scale. If you look at all accounts and activity online, there probably is enough bots to outnumber people.
Personally, I don't interact with THE WHOLE INTERNET. I interact with people I know, and Lemmy, which feels more human than other platforms, so I'm confident that most of my online interactions are with actual humans.
This is true, already you can tell it is more real people here.
That's what they want you to think!
I like the way you capitalised THE WHOLE INTERNET
I'm not having a go at you. Just make me chuckle like it's like the way an old person would refer to the "WHOLE INTERNET".
Again just to be clear not having a go at you or suggesting anything about your age. It just made me laugh.
No, you're right. I'm pretty fucking old.
False I'm a bot. You're interacting with me!
You're absolutely right! We're not just interacting — we're having a conversation.
My theory (very bad) is that the fediverse is the prelude of an internet so decentralized it will stop being useful to corporations.
The “upper web” will be corporate, ads, marketing and paid services. The “lower web” will be a series of semi connected networks that will loosely operate as a whole.
Maybe in 10~20 years, a physical new internet will be born, completely independent from the current one and untouched by companies.
A new internet isn't even needed, just a new protocol.
Corpos aren't on Gopher or Gemini, for instance.
We don't even need a new protocol. HTTP/1.1 is perfectly fine! I wish people would stop trying to throw it out.
-- Frost
Beyond the technical aspect, I don't see how this is feasible. There are few sites out there supporting just 1.1, and the population using HTTP won't likely create more. While those using alternatives continue to.
Eh? Doesn't pretty much everything support HTTP 1.1 still? It's not like it's dead.
And growing a community of HTTP 1.1 website people certainly isn't any harder than growing a community of alt-protocol website people. Even if it were an alt-protocol nothing normal supports anymore (which it isn't, thankfully).
The issue I take with it isnt the "bots are everywhere" or these days even the "bots are most traffic bits", its the "the internet has been abandoned by humans" bit. admittedly this is anecdotal, but I dont really know anyone that doesnt use the internet, and if it were really true that humans largely have left it behind, things like social media wouldnt be such a big concern, vans for online shopping services like amazon wouldnt be everywhere, etc. What I think has happened is that just about as much real human traffic exists as ever, and weve added an even bigger volume of bots on top of that, which isnt a dead internet per se, its one that is being overwhelmed with noise.
The average internet user 15 years ago was creative and social, now it's a consoomer of "content"
The problem of the dead internet isn't that there are no human users, but that the human users are isolated from each other or herded into ideologically suitable echo chambers, where misinformation and lies can be harder to resist because they already have momentum. It's also hard to prove because we've demonstrated the inclination to do it to ourselves even without malign orchestrating influences like giant corporations.
An indicator of a dead internet wouldn't be that no one in your IRL experience uses the internet, but that either A) their experiences are extremely congruent with your own (you're both in the same bubble) or B) their experience of the internet reality has no shared basis with your own (only one of you is in a bubble, or you're both in separate bubbles). Which... does happen to me occasionally, especially with older folks. A lot of people are caught in the dead internet of facebook, and are being groomed and manipulated like cattle. The export products of the bot farming industry are influence, votes, hatred of minorities, etc. I suspect a lot of the MAGA elements of my family are deep into dead internet traps, though of course it's hard to get an accurate picture of their media diet because they don't trust me enough to share it.
Do I think this means the internet is now Certified Dead? No, but I think it's a sliding scale of deadness and it's somewhere between 0 and 100 percent. Where on that scale we are is difficult to pin down.
I'm not a bot and I don't believe you are one. OTOH, AI bots sure are polluting the internet, but I haven't interacted with one except for the annoying merge requests on GitHub.
"But I haven’t interacted with one except for the annoying merge requests on GitHub." You probably wouldn't even know now if you did, it is getting harder to tell bot from human.
the corporate internet is dead. there are still places where people still exist, still creating things. you just need to know where to look
Thats the problem though. I know those places still exist, but the 10-20 minutes a day I have to browse the internet isnt enough to find and verify those places, so the internet is just dead to me. Also the latest generation is growing up with the "dead internet," so many of them dont know that a better internet once existed and still exists in tiny isolated pockets that are getting harder and harder to find without a guide.
Ok, I don't want to actually advertise for something paid, but in this case it is a free thing Kagi provides: https://kagi.com/smallweb/ They have basically a (curated? I think) list of human created non-corp things to look through. It is also a filter option if you pay for Kagi search, but the standalone page is free.
internet has largely been abandoned by humans
No, they are still there, staring on their screens all day long.
and replaced by non-human activity.
I would say overwhelmed.
The bots already have majority in some aspects, for example websites for product tests are 99% generated fake. And the bots continue to grow with unimaginable growth rates.
Humans are creating more bots, and more humans are creating bots.
This is Lemmy. We don't have followers. Just stalkers.
“Every breath you take, every move you make…”
Probably. We have daily brainwashing on all platforms, and it's on Lemmy too.
They all try to make the user sit and circle jerk over something, wasting their life energy.
When you get old and you have spend your days playing games or being on social media, you will feel it was a very empty life. Meaning is found when taking to other people in real life, having fun together. But everyone seems to rather sit on their phones or being plugged into music than to talk to strangers and live your life in the real world.
Maybe not the whole internet, but it's been proven that anybody with enough money can pay for a whole bunch of fake profiles powered by bot farms to sway the discussion and online perception in their favor.
Its true, and its more true everyday.
More and more traffic is servers or bots or LLMs, talking to eachother.
We're the minority now, us humans, talking to other humans.
https://cybersecuritynews.com/bots-surpass-humans-in-web-traffic/
Like the dinosaur... You had your time.
This future is our world. The future is our time.
Surface internet sure feels dead. That's why people are moving to places like Lemmy, Discord (yes, I know), private chat groups etc.
Small web / indie web is a thing too
https://indieweb.org/small_web
Dead net is a good problem in a way. Corrals all the shit into one space so you can side step it cleanly.
My biggest issue with the ‘dead Internet theory’ is that the Internet is not the World Wide Web. The Internet is the physical network, the Web is one of many software platforms that use the Internet. The Internet isn’t going anywhere, it’s the Web that is dying and really just parts of it. Whether we move our favorite parts over to whatever comes next or the Web can be salvaged remains to be seen.
A lot of people mention stats like a high volume of bot traffic, that's almost all ai companies trying to scrape data before it's gone. Not bots pretending to be people.
I believe in live internet theory. Bots are rare and relatively easy to detect, nearly every account I interact with online is a real person.
People just use the bot thing as a way of explaining away contrary views. I don't need that explanation, because I have this crazy idea that actual human beings can believe different things and even be wrong.
I agree, in principle, that people call other people bots as a way to insult them. But this is just survivorship bias:
Bots are relatively easy to detect
I think that a lot of it is a result of forms of interaction that are easy to falsify and which real people are not expected to exercise judgment on. Fake likes, views, and upvotes involve little that can be scrutinized at the user level and are mainly a negotiation between spammers and a social media company. Those companies favor organizing their sites around these sorts of shallow metrics, and selling a passive experience that confers or requires next to no social agency, because they want to be able to treat the people using their services as commodities they own.
These problems would be greatly diminished with social networks that are actually social.
Perhaps social media is dead, but the internet itself is still alive and well. The internet is not just social media, it is a global network that does more than just post memes and shitpost.
It's about on a par with the "birds aren't real" theory.
Over half of the internet traffic now is all bots, you better think again.
Just saw a report on my feed here that said something like ~~80~~ 60% of TikTok is AI crap and over 20% of Facebook is. So that means that sites like Threads, Instagram, X, or any other social media is going to have a large percentage of bots, AI and real trolls, and corporate shills over and above those numbers.
On top of the unaffiliated trolls and shit-stirrers already out there.
So it’s well on the way to happening.
Edit: it was 60%
something like 80 60% of TikTok is AI crap
more than 90 % of TikTok is crap, doesn't matter if its AI crap or human crap