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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."
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!
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.
False I'm a bot. You're interacting with me!
You're absolutely right! We're not just interacting — we're having a conversation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is Lemmy. We don't have followers. Just stalkers.
“Every breath you take, every move you make…”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
That's just what a bot would say to get us to continue interacting with it!
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.
Just saw a report on my feed here that said something like ~~80~~ 60% 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%
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
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.
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.
How much is from sites that all but abandoned anyway? Like digg or yahoo-answers. How's gameFAQs these days?