“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.”
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!
Hello, fellow human!
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
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”?
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.
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.
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.
This is Lemmy. We don’t have followers. Just stalkers.
“Every breath you take, every move you make…”
I like to think the one downvote my replies usually get is the same person every time
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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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.
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.
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.
0100110, ehrm, I mean, that’s just fearmongering. Hey do you have some coolant on you?
A flower would also be acceptable.
