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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."
the corporate internet is dead. there are still places where people still exist, still creating things. you just need to know where to look
This is a problem for large social media. Not so much for smaller non english communities with good moderation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
False I'm a bot. You're interacting with me!
You're absolutely right! We're not just interacting — we're having a conversation.
This is true, already you can tell it is more real people here.
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
Hello, fellow human!
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.
What would a younger person say instead? "Everyone online"?
A younger person would say the whole internet
source: am not old
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.
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.
That makes sense, it's kind of like watering down something, and the bots are all the water.
I thought that was a funhole content.
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 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
google becoming evil and enshittified made the internet feel much deader
Becoming more plausible every day.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.