What do you think about the dead internet theory?

Comments

• Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    This is true, already you can tell it is more real people here.

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    • Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s what they want you to think!

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    • Elw00t@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Hello, fellow human!

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    • TheparishofChigwell@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      By my estimate Lemmy is about 20 percent bots

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  • gasgiant@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No, you’re right. I’m pretty fucking old.

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    • samus12345@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      What would a younger person say instead? “Everyone online”?

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  • Orioniae@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Fmstrat@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      A new internet isn’t even needed, just a new protocol.

      Corpos aren’t on Gopher or Gemini, for instance.

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  • thethrilloftime69@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    False I’m a bot. You’re interacting with me!

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    • executivechimp@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You’re absolutely right! We’re not just interacting — we’re having a conversation.

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  • kinship@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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

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  • kinship@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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

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    • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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  • TheDeadInternet@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s already been confirmed there’s way more bots than people.

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    • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      And I’m sure that if you were one of them, you’d have noticed that I said exactly that in the first sentence.

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• CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The average internet user 15 years ago was creative and social, now it’s a consoomer of content

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  • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • yermaw@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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  • Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That make sense, it’s like watering down something and the bots are all the water.

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• 1984@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Probably. We have daily brainwashing on all platforms, and it’s on Lemmy too.

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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• uncommoncorvid@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  the corporate internet is dead. there are still places where people still exist, still creating things. you just need to know where to look

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  • Poojabber@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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 fins 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 isolatef pockets that are getting harder and harder to find without a guide.

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    • fatcat@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Ok, I don’t want to actually advertise for something paid, but in this case it is a free thing Kagi provides: 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.

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  • architect@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Ah yes, don’t tell anyone.

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• one_old_coder@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    “But I haven’t interacted with one except for the annoying merge requests on GitHub.” You wouldn’t even know now if you did, it is getting harder to tell.

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  • FudgyMcTubbs@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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• Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This is Lemmy. We don’t have followers. Just stalkers.

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  • YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    “Every breath you take, every move you make…”

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  • Widdershins@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I like to think the one downvote my replies usually get is the same person every time

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• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Its true, and its more true everyday.

  More and more traffic is servers or bots or LLMs, talking either to eachother, or to people.

  We’re the minority now, humans.

  cnet.com/…/bots-now-outnumber-humans-on-the-inter…

  cybersecuritynews.com/bots-surpass-humans-in-web-…

  __

  Image

  Like the dinosaur… You had your time. This future is our world. The future is our time.

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• c64z86@piefed.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Maybe not the whole internet, but it’s been proven that anybody can pay for a bot farm to sway the discussion and online perception in their favor.

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  • schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yep! Those farms are all over Reddit now. So sad.

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• kbal@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It's about on a par with the "birds aren't real" theory.

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  • Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Over half the internet are all bots, you better think again.

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    • Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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 used to some degree is facilitated by crawlers.

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• Objection@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • placebo@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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

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    • Objection@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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  • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s just what a bot would say to get us to continue interacting with it!

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    • Objection@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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• atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There are so many bots pretending to be people. Have you not a bot farm?

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    • irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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

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• chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• loric@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Bullshit.

  Social media <> the internet.

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  • Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There are also more people. Are streets not real if autonomous driving becomes a thing?

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• RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Just saw a report on my feed here that said something like 80% 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.

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  • NotAnonymousAtAll@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    something like 80 60% of TikTok is AI crap

    more than 90 % of TikTok is crap, doesn’t matter if its AI crap or human crap

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• AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Not ten minutes ago I followed a link to Reddit, researching something from Lemmy.

  The Reddit post had 57 replies. I started reading aging down but did not find any legitimate replies. It was all ad-bots

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  • Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Now, that is scary.

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• Renat@szmer.info ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Tv man from Skibidi toilet

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  • lando55@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Is this evidence in favor of or against the theory

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    • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s in favor of brainrot theory. Which honestly may be worse.

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• Eh_I@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  How much is from sites that all but abandoned anyway? Like digg or yahoo-answers. How’s gameFAQs these days?

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  • Anonymous_Leaker@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yahoo answers doesn’t exist anymore.

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    • Eh_I@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      RIP how is babby formed

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• Rentlar@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• orenj@leminal.space ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I mean, thats kinda what happened with reddit and youtube, yeah?

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• jestho@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  0100110, ehrm, I mean, that’s just fearmongering. Hey do you have some coolant on you?

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  • bradorsomething@ttrpg.network ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    A flower would also be acceptable.

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• flamingleg@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  google becoming evil and enshittified made the internet feel much deader

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• kibblebits@quokk.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Lemmy is defiantly a dead internet.

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• Nytefyre@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• LovableSidekick@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Exactly

    Its called dying.

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• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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