“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.”
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.
Becoming more plausible every day.
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 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.
google becoming evil and enshittified made the internet feel much deader
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 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”?
This is true, already you can tell it is more real people here.
That’s what they want you to think!
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.
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.
That makes sense, it’s kind of like watering down something, and the bots are all the water.
This is Lemmy. We don’t have followers. Just stalkers.
“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.
“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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
