“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
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
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!
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
Hello, fellow human!
Hello! Have you heard about %NATUARAL INTERACTION 1706 HEADING%? It’s great for % NATUARAL INTERACTION 1706 BODY_TEXT%.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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”
That makes sense, it’s kind of like watering down something, and the bots are all the water.
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.
and are being groomed and manipulated like cattle
I still have Facebook because its somewhat useful to me sometimes. Only visit it once or twice a year. Saw my aunties page the other day, and its filled with “drill baby drill why aren’t we exploring north sea oil” and “RIP Charlie Kirk you were a hero to us all!” and shit like that. Which are exact opposites of what I could consider acceptable opinions given what I “know”.
I couldnt work out if I’ve been lied to or she has. Surely at least one of us has been fed the wrong information because shes not a horrible person.
It’s very confusing when it happens to someone you know because they usually aren’t horrible people. Nor are they particularly stupid, at least not more or less than your average human.
I think people in left-of-center spaces like to say things like “The Republican party is a cult” as a sort of disparaging cliche without really appreciating what a cult is or how they operate in real life. They see things like “Donald Trump ate a live baby on camera today, also his support among Republicans is at 90%” and assume that 90% of Republicans are cool with infant cannibalism, when in reality those Republicans just don’t see the same news we do. They are actually in a cult, which means (among other things) that they are conditioned to believe the cult leader (Trump, at the moment) and his approved mouthpieces, and only them. They’re reminded, constantly, that the left is deranged and willing to say anything to make Trump look bad, so when Trump does something so heinous it actually does penetrate their media bubble, it gets brushed off as more evidence of the left’s lunacy. It’s a very resilient form of conditioning and it’s been going on way longer than the internet’s been around, and it’s… really hard. Because they aren’t horrible people, mostly. They’re mostly scared, and broke, and confused about the world, and they flock to people like Trump because they have been told by their handlers that he’s their best bet. Once he’s dead or too toxic even for the Republicans, they’ll be reoriented toward the next leader.
I am constantly reminded of a song from the early 2000s called Bastard by Ben Folds, especially the lyric that goes “spread the facts on the floor like a fan. Throw away the ones that make you feel bad.”
The Republican party is a cult through and through, and the way cults work is that they give the desperate and victimized an answer to their troubles. They tell them that it isn’t their fault, it’s someone else’s. Specifically, it’s the Outsider’s fault. They appeal to their emotions and create an insular bubble against anybody who says anything that goes against what they believe. Because if you aren’t with them, then you’re against them. And that makes you an Outsider, too. An enemy to be hated and vilified.
So they decide on their answers before they’ve even seen the facts, and any that don’t fit what they want can be safely discarded as the enemies’ lies poisoning their glorious truth.
And what makes this even harder to combat is that there’s a tipping point for most people beyond which it’s incredibly difficult to come back from. You have the real crazies who don’t care anymore, if the leader says babies are delicious, then they’ll start boiling cooking oil, but for most people in a cult, the thing that truly traps them even if they’ve realized that the cult is wrong, is that they’d have to admit that they’re wrong. And not just that they, themselves, are wrong, but that everything they’ve done, everything that they’ve believed, for years and years, is wrong. And it’s a rare kind of person who can look down from the summit of that mountain and accept that every step they’ve taken up it has been a step in the wrong direction.
I’m also reminded of Nazi Germany. The people turning in Jews weren’t the monsters at the top, like Heimlich Himmler, they were “good people” - the neighbor who always has a pocket full of dog treats when they go out for a walk, the owner of the local grocery store. The people you walk past every day at work or on the street. Your mother, father, aunt, or cousin. Your friends. “Bad people” are never “bad” people. They’re just people. There’s footage of Hitler that’s been floating around the web for decades at this point that people almost unanimously say is unnerving: it’s Hitler, sitting at a table outside, who turns to the person holding the camera and gets up, saying “What are you doing, filming an old man like me? I should be the one filming a beautiful girl like you!” People are unsettled by it because it’s simply Hitler being human, like anyone else. He’s not acting like the monster that we see in our heads. He’s just…a person. And that goes for all of the worst monstrosities to ever walk the planet - and the most gentle of saints. Each and every one of them is…just a person, who, like everyone else, believes that they’re the hero of their story.
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.
0100110, ehrm, I mean, that’s just fearmongering. Hey do you have some coolant on you?
