What do you think about the dead internet theory?
"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."
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yes
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.
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://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/bots-now-outnumber-humans-on-the-internet-heres-what-that-actually-means/
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.
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%
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
0100110, ehrm, I mean, that's just fearmongering. Hey do you have some coolant on you?
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:
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 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.
TV man from Skibidi toilet
Is this evidence in favor of or against the theory
It's in favor of brainrot theory. Which honestly may be worse.
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
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
That's not bad; that's prophetic...and is already happening.
This is true, already you can tell it is more real people here.
Hello, fellow human!
Hello! Have you heard about %NATUARAL INTERACTION 1706 HEADING%? It’s great for % NATUARAL INTERACTION 1706 BODY_TEXT%.
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
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.
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
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
If it weren't for my family and fiance being in my life I would probably never carry a phone on me ever again. I am dipping my toes into being online and in the house less. I wish I didn't fucking need to carry a phone though. I wish these devices weren't a fucking part of life.
Not on my lemmy
It's kind of a hard call to really call the internet entirely dead. It just feels dead and there are portions of where people once were, that is dead. If you're looking for honest engagement in places where bots are, then you'll believe the internet is dead.
No, they are still there, staring on their screens all day long.
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.
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 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.
That makes sense, it's kind of like watering down something, and the bots are all the water.
Depending on your definitions, more than half the internet traffic is by bots.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/bots-internet-traffic-ai-chatgpt-b2733450.html
But this does include all automated traffic, including scrapers and stuff. It's not like 50 percent of people here are bots.
This is Lemmy. We don't have followers. Just stalkers.
I like to think the one downvote my replies usually get is the same person every time
“Every breath you take, every move you make…”
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.
Reddit is lousy with them. In general, I assume MOST of the post-2024 posts and replies I see on any subreddit with a strong subscriber base are made by bots. It's why I came to Lemmy.
Lemmys not immune. It's just obscure enough for now to be not worth the effort to mine. Yet.
There's probably very little protection from federation.
Culture wise, Lemmy is where redditors come to die. I expect the golden age of Lemmy won't last long if Jupiter (Reddit) stops catching inbound asteroids. That is, if Reddit become bad enough and Lemmy becomes reddit 2.0, then Lemmy becomes reddit 2.0.
"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.
There's a surprising amount of them on social media, especially when talking about contentious topics. Typically right wing supporting. It's pretty hard to tell which is human and artificial.
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.
The internet has always been like this depending on how you define non-human activity.
No, it did not always have so many bots.
Non human activity != bots.
The number of bots back then was way less, that is what I am saying. So not always been like it is today.
Again that also depends on how you define bot. Most traffic in the internet isn't from software run by a human. This has always been true.
If you're saying "the amount of bots pretending to be a real humam on the public-facing web has increases. Then yes, that's true.
Yes, that is what I am saying, lol.
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.
Or just take over a sub and ban your enemies, but keep a token few for your mob to bury in downvotes so they look crazy.
Yep! Those farms are all over Reddit now. So sad.
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.
There are so many bots pretending to be people. Have you not seen a bot farm?
Yeah, but they're not on the fediverse, and they're definitely not the majority. I'm talking about the stats saying that 80% of Internet traffic is bots
I am talking about places like Reddit, It's probably like 70% bots.
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.
So your Google search isn't real, because the result is based on bots crawling the internet.
Well internet searches were based on crawlers looonngg before Google.
Just like this example you can make thousands of examples, where the sites we use to some degree is facilitated by crawlers.
Google isn't like all those other bots, lol. It is a multi trillion dollar company used as a search engine. Scanning the internet for the information. Google Search does operate on artificial intelligence.
I think there are dead networks, like Twitter, YouTube comment sections, facebook, TikTok etc.
I just have to create my own networks or participate in different networks than the mainstream where there is sufficient human activity and limited bot activity, and wherw there is bot activity it is clearly delineated.
This is a problem for large social media. Not so much for smaller non english communities with good moderation.
Bullshit.
Social media <> the internet.
There are way more bots now than back then, you could randomly be arguing with one somewhere. And have no idea. Users of the internet are mostly all bots now. More bots than humans.
There are also more people. Are streets not real if autonomous driving becomes a thing?
"Dead internet theory", there are not trillions of bots on the streets arguing yet...
I don't think it's true. While I think it's possible, even likely that bot traffic outnumbers humans now, it's not humans leaving therefore not the internet being abandoned, just exponentially more bots. And while that includes bots pretending to be human, there's no proof that's anywhere near most bot traffic.
google becoming evil and enshittified made the internet feel much deader
Becoming more plausible every day.
It's more of an attitude than a theory. We do have metrics that say bot activity now represents about 60% of internet traffic, recently surpassing human activity. That's a majority, but the whole internet processes around 150 million requests per second, so 60 million of that is humans. Per second. Objectively I wouldn't call that "dead" by any means.
Exactly
Its called dying.
The majority of bot traffic that outnumbers people are just various crawlers and scrapers that never interact with real people beyond what can be done with a single button as it does its shit. If it ever starts to be the majority of the content itself, too, that's when the internet would actually be dead.
Looks like you underestimated the bot farms.
I don't think they the whole Internet has been abandoned yet, but bots keep growing as a percentage of traffic for various reasons. There is also a vested interest in more people to have bots than not.
I thought that was a funhole content.
Lost but not wrong
Who's asking? 😅
Your friendly anonymous.
Lemmy is defiantly a dead internet.
I never agreed with it. Yes there's bots on the internet, but people are here too. The majority of lemmy is people, not bots. User facing websites are people, there'd be no reason to have bots post things just so other bots can see it. If that was the purpose, websites would just spew json formatted content around instead of someone building intricate websites full of css and shitty javascript.
There is a whole different internet though. One with devices like sensors, connecting to servers and posting numbers into databases. Automated code connecting everywhere for data aggregation. There's also everything other than HTTP.
The theory doesn't state there are no people on the internet, just that the majority of the internet is bot. Those bots are not created by the websites, but created by people who want to earn money farming content, manipulate people or just be annoying.
The people are of course still there, but they are largely relegated to engaging like people did with television. There's some human content and a whole lot of generated content and a key thing about "internet" was that it was a big bidirectional thing where people put content out as much as they took it in.
People have been significantly pushed toward passive engagement with a corporate curated internet instead of active engagement. That is the crux of this concept.
I do believe there's a very real risk of several related scenarios but it can be a good thing. Hear me out.
One of my favorite answers to the Fermi Paradox - why we don't encounter other life in the universe - is that civilization is a tool not a goal. This hypothesis implies that as soon as civilization empowers individuals enough to be self sustainable they retreat to their own space ships as cooperation and conflict are simply undesirable. If you can quantum print anything you want and you have an AI interface to educate, entertain you and be your safe gate to a shared network then why would you spend all that effort to group together?
If this hypothesis has any merit then we'd first see this happen on the digital space. Instead of interfacing to lemmy where there are straight up lies you need to verify yourself and conflicts you need to endure you can have a AI interface that abstracts all that away from you.
Is this dead internet? Kinda, at least of current understanding. Is this bad? Only if we risk capture by allowing manipulation of these interfaces. This is why libre software is critical for our future - we must trust out software if we delegate such responsibility to it.
for one, would it bother you if most accounts were bots? what difference would it make to you? would you still be on the internet?
for two, i'm honestly much more worried about paid influencers, newspapers, tv agencies with an agenda, hollywood, etc. instead of a few bots on the internet. for example lots of hollywood movies shape american culture much more than bot accounts do, yet we don't recognize that as problematic.
Sounds like something a bot would say.
I somewhat agree with you. Feels like Idealism is primed for a pop culture comeback and tbh it might not be a bad thing. We are way to obsessed by finding "one true timeline" when there's simply no such thing.