“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.
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
Nobody in here actually exists. I am the only real person. /s
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.
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.
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.
it’s on Lemmy too.
Kinda hard to gauge the degree though.
Are you a bot? Am I a bot? Is anyone reading this or is it all just bots jerking each other off?
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.
I grew up in the 80s.
People stared at their newspapers/comic books or their Gameboys or had eyes closed listening to head phones or just tried not to make eye contact.
There was not some golden era when talking to strangers was normal and people were living in the “real” world. Today isn’t nearly as divorced from the past is people like to pretend.
Just saw a report on my feed here that said something like
8060% 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
How much is from sites that all but abandoned anyway? Like digg or yahoo-answers. How’s gameFAQs these days?
Yahoo answers doesn’t exist anymore.
RIP how is babby formed
I remember asking something about the Mandela effect and my question was taken town.
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.
I feel that for the past two weeks the bot number surged here… Been here for 2 years but lately the opinions people are upvoting in some threads seem like prime rage bait
This is true, already you can tell it is more real people here.
That’s what they want you to think!
Hello, fellow human!
Hello! Have you heard about %NATUARAL INTERACTION 1706 HEADING%? It’s great for % NATUARAL INTERACTION 1706 BODY_TEXT%.
By my estimate Lemmy is about 20 percent bots
I actually think it it might be lower on here.
I hope.
If a neutral post about the Israeli dictator gets 20 percent down votes I get the feeling theres something going on though, that’s one of the tells
Plus reuploads from other social media that seem fully automated for a while now
I’m sure there is astroturfing but it just doesn’t work that well on intelligent crowds, the succes rate will be lower so our spidy sense isn’t tingly enough. But there’s tingling allright.
Isn’t mass paranoia through induced mass psychosis fun? Hard to keep your pants clean walking through muddy streets
Oh there’s absolutely reupload bots. They even say that they’re bots, heh.
– Frost
I feel that for the past two weeks the bot number surged here… Been here for 2 years but lately the opinions people are upvoting in some threads seem like prime rage bait
I know exactly what you mean. I’ve noticed the same “shift in quality” but I honestly think they are real, live, barely intelligent people.
I can’t help but think the recent surge in “How do you get past a Reddit ban?” posts is related.
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.
That’s not bad; that’s prophetic…and is already happening.
It’s already been confirmed there’s way more bots than people.
And I’m sure that if you were one of them, you’d have noticed that I said exactly that in the second sentence.
No you said theres probably more bots and I said and confirmed there are more bots than people.
Probably isn’t a confirmation.
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.
What would a younger person say instead? “Everyone online”?
A younger person would say the whole internet
source: am not 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.
let’s delve into this discussion
Not ten minutes ago I followed a link to Reddit, researching something from Lemmy.
The Reddit post had 57 replies. I started scrolling down but did not find any legitimate replies. It was all ad-bots
Now, that is scary.
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.
Ah yes, don’t tell anyone.
I mean, thats kinda what happened with reddit and youtube, yeah?
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
Sure, I can’t know if there are bots that are really good at imitating people. But it’s my choice to go them the benefit of the doubt.
I think the most likely case of encountering a non-obvious bot would be if there’s a human behind it copy-pasting responses, which means there’s still some degree of engagement. If you don’t tailor it to the specific context and don’t double check it, it’s likely not going to be that convincing.
That’s just what a bot would say to get us to continue interacting with it!
Nah. Ima go with
I have lugnuts Greg. Can you milk me?
Funny thing, I actually got banned from Twitter ages ago because I just made an account lurk and follow some political accounts and I didn’t Tweet anything or customize my avatar, so it looked exactly like I was a bot follower to boost numbers.
