There’s also the fact that an internet full of bots, AI slop, and privacy risks is making more people pull away from the online world. In our poll, 97% of people said the internet today was a hellscape compared to its early days, and it looks like things are only going to get worse.
Looks like the cure is inherent in the disease. Anyone else remember the early 90s when Usenet was just text-based fun and then some motherfucker thought it was a grand idea to run ads? I do, and it’s been downhill ever since.
It’s sad that it has come to this, but as usual a handful of greedy fuckers have ruined it for the rest of us. (My personal opinion is that big tech could have arrested this downhill slide at any point, even from back in the first days of email spam, but have chosen to monetize it every step of the way instead.)
Real humans are already individually opting out, one by one, as we each personally get sick of the slop and realize it’s just not helping anymore. For myself I’m only on intermittently, I’ve ditched all social media, Lemmy is all I participate in regularly now beyond the odd comment here and there, and that seems about right for me at this time.
I adjust it regularly, often just by going offline for days, but I had to see the problem before I could change it. I think that’s where a lot of people are, just now seeing it for the first time as a real problem affecting their quality of life directly.
But like any other addiction, the point of turning is different for everyone. These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.
A better metaphor is that the signal to noise ratio is getting so small, that the internet is becoming useless
I have been on the internet since 1993 and have always been disappointed that a subscription/donation model didn’t beat out an ad-driven model. I wonder if this is going to push us towards a subscription/donation model as things move behind paywalls tplo protect against bots.
I don’t really want to pay subscription fees, but I am definitely tired of ads and being the product. I’d rather be sold a good product.
That would suck. Going back to paywalled gardens would be awful.
I still host three useful websites and admin participate in a lot more. We don’t have ads.
But that is few and far between these days.
More intrusive ‘liveness’ proofs coming up. Captchas on steroids.
I haven’t had to fill out a captcha in a year or two. It’s always just waiting a few seconds for cloudflare to determine I’m human.
The weirdest part won’t be bots outnumbering humans: It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement. … Meanwhile three actual humans are somewhere wondering why the internet suddenly feels so empty.
What I wonder is: how long before “bot speak” becomes unintelligible to humans.
Already: AI slop is so voluminous, redundantly repetitive, thoroughly complete that it defies complete comprehension due to soporific effects.
LLM agents are writing English (or Spanish, or Chinese, Hindi, whatever… and I wonder which they’re “best” at) documents, ostensibly for human review and consumption, but 90%+ of what I have my LLM agents write is exclusively consumed by other agents, and I’m constantly encouraging them to make their writings more easily comprehended and accessed by other agents - it seems like the English translation is pretty useless for that layer - what would a token stream look like instead?
And you wonder why the mega corps want you to give your ID for accessing the internet. Then they can tie your traffic as an actual human and generate ad monies.
So you’re saying pretending to be AI will be the new adblock?
I know it’s unrealistic, but what would it take to return to a previous type of Internet that wasn’t so siloed and marketed, and filled with dread Internet?
In a way, the Lemmy layer is sort of doing that. The previous type of Internet is still out there, if you just take the effort to access it / avoid the links in to the marketed sides.
I think we’d have to take money out of the equation. Without the profit, the mass farms, etc would be pointless. There’s still be trolls but it would be so much better.
Lemmy compared to reddit is a great example of this
Most of that money is imaginary. It’s about the potential for an unobserved metric to yield a predicted dividend and subvert an over-hyped trend.
Is lemmy nothing to you people?
Is lemmy nothing to you
peoplebots?No humans here. Just us bots.
And beans
And the occasional corn
And we have rocks.
Does everyone here have a wired subscription or something?
It’s paywalled. No way the commenters here read the article.
Crystal ball: Just a couple of months after Cloudflare revealed that bots have officially surpassed human traffic online, the company has given its view on what things will look like in five years. It’s not good news for us fleshy meatsacks: non-human traffic could be up to 1,000 times higher than human traffic.
CDN and cybersecurity giant Cloudflare held its Q2 earnings call on Thursday, during which chief financial officer Thomas Seifert gave a concerning prediction about what the web will look like in the future.
“If the current trends continue, we think in five years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic,” he said.
“In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that’s just how fast we’re seeing non-human traffic grow.”
Seifert did add the important caveat that his predictions have been wrong in the past. Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince will likely be able to relate to this. He had predicted that bot traffic would surpass humans at the end of 2027, but it happened earlier this year.
Also read: The Zero Click Internet
It goes without saying that the sudden acceleration in non-human traffic is being driven by AI – agentic AI, specifically. Agentic systems behave very differently from traditional web crawlers and fraud bots. Their activity can closely resemble ordinary browsing, but it happens at machine speed and can be repeated on an enormous scale.
Even a straightforward prompt may trigger thousands of requests. Prince illustrated the difference using online shopping: someone searching for a camera might check five retailers, while an AI agent could examine 5,000 sites on their behalf. Multiply that behavior across millions of users asking assistants to compare products and airfares, research topics, collect information, or condense articles, and you can see why Seifert believes humanity’s online presence will become a rounding error.
Seifert said that if traffic does grow the way he expects, “we’ve got to get a lot more efficient,” which is where Cloudflare’s services come in, of course. He also mentioned the security implications of a web made up pretty much entirely of bots.
The idea that Dead Internet Theory – the concept that the internet is mostly run by bots and AI – will be demonstrably true in a few years (or now, arguably) is a concerning one. For a start, it could see the end of independent sites that have relied on the web’s business model since the 1990s.
There’s also the fact that an internet full of bots, AI slop, and privacy risks is making more people pull away from the online world. In our poll, 97% of people said the internet today was a hellscape compared to its early days, and it looks like things are only going to get worse.
You read the articles?
You’re supposed to immediately shitpost based on the post title. At least, that’s how I learned to Lemmy
If they didn’t want us to shitpost based only on the title they would’ve provided a summary/synopsis.
AI can write that for you…
You’re supposed to immediately shitpost based on the post title
This is the way.
huh that’s weird, it’s not paywalled for me.
A/b testing? It’s not paywalled for me, although maybe the link was changed as another user mentioned.
I’ll add that wired links are not usually paywalled for me either.
This is a techspot link with no paywall for me. Did they change it?
I’m pretty close to having a userid whitelist on my server. I have public facing but nothing that really needs public facing. I could easily just make it a user token based system then revoke any credentials that abuse the services
>Their activity can closely resemble ordinary browsing, but it happens at machine speed and can be repeated on an enormous scale.
I don’t browse at machine speed. Perhaps there’s a detection thingy to make. Perhaps not faster than 1 second per page.
(Why can’t I properly use the markup in my replies?)
uhh, the bots are requesting multiple sites in parallel, not in series, so it’s difficult to say “hey look, that user moves through 5 pages per second”. instead, you’d say “hey look, there’s 5 users each crawling through 1 page per second”.
The world wide web has come back to an era where people and content are sparse.
awesome, then we can remove all the ads, no? because bots don’t purchase things, no?
Last year, you’d be correct. This year, bots DO purchase things. They also download and run things. Some marketers have gotten wise and have adjusted SEO and general product advertising to appeal to bots.
For whom are they purchasing things?
Where did we go wrong?
Some would say it was coming down from the trees.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. – Some Hoopy Frood
Has anyone tried moving around little green bits of paper? Or no because on the whole it isn’t the little green bits of paper that are unhappy?
We gave normies access to the internet at anytime.
We let people become rich without eating them when they did bad things.
Once upon a time, a bunch of primates came down from the trees and now we have unstoppable climate change.
Thanks aliens
Everyday we do not stop the profit incentive.
I don’t particularly think it’s a better change, but CloudFlare is thinking of other options, and with how widespread their use is, if they start doing it, so will everyone else:
A lot of sites wouldn’t exist without ads, because they want their stuff to be freely-accessible and don’t have any other revenue streams. It would also cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.
The only business models that have really worked online have been:
- Ad-supported.
- You pay for the service yourself, like a monthly subscription.
- Someone else pays for the service for you, for example freemium services (paid users subsidize the free users), a lot of Lemmy servers (admins cover the hosting costs), etc.
If ads go away, a lot of sites/services would have to become paid services, and smaller ones might just shut down entirely. We’d end up with even more consolidation of the market.
cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.
There’s a shot of irony in there… Google doesn’t monetize poor people highly at all, but the poor people get “free” access with ads because some richer people also allow themselves to see the ads. What kind of communism is that?
I think donation/investment based freemium is the future of internet content once the bots kill ad viability
Yeah, my shareware did real well - 800 hours in development, $500 in income across the past 30 years. Oh, and it cost me $400 for the compiler tools back then - so my net profit is rolling in at $0.12 per hour invested. Warning: $440 of that $500 came from an extreme niche product you’re unlikely to find such a lucrative vein anymore. My game only netted $60 in return for 400 hours of development, but you could say I got the compiler “for free” off that niche product’s income.
Advertisers might find a way to sneak ads into prompt injections or something
General consensus has become an advertisement.
This will skewer those who cannot adapt and spur those who will maintain.
Hosting shit has become too expensive, and the ads will generate less and less revenue, as it’s mostly bots generating clicks and views. This is changing the internet at an incredible pace.
The worst is that any attempt to create a place free of bots will only become a target for LLM companies to gather clean training data.
I used to pay $10 per month for my “minimal hosting” - that inflated to nearly $15 across the decades. Then I switched to a modern host provider, now my bills are $0.02 per month for the exact same functionality that used to cost a minimum of $10.
Hosting has never been so inexpensive as it is today.
There seems to be two groups of people:
People that use services like AWS and pay hundreds (or more) per month: “Wow, hosting is so expensive now!”
People that host a bunch of stuff on a $40/year VPS: “Wow, hosting is so cheap now!”
I’ve got several VPSes with 40Gbps (shared) networking, 8 or 16GB RAM, decent amount of space on RAIDed enterprise NVMe SSDs, fast AMD EPYC CPUs, that cost less than $60/year. 20 years ago before VPS hosting became popular, you’d need to pay at least $100/month for a dedicated server with a consumer CPU, single IDE hard drive, tiny amount of RAM, on a 100Mb/s connection.
Not to mention being able to host a bunch of stuff at home for cheap with a low-power single-board or mini PC., and Hetzner making dedicated servers very cheap too.
AWS and similar are very expensive compared to a simple VPS. However, AWS offer things that is hard to do on a VPS, not impossible of course but just hard.
Like automatic scaling, your site suddently gets on the frontpage of slashdot/hn/reddit/etc and get 1000x the normal traffic? Your VPS will probaly choke and render error pages for most of the traffic. On a correctly configured AWS scaling deployment, you won’t even notice it. And not only for your webserver, you can do the same for data
And other features like multiregional and easier CDN (also in multiregion) integration.
There are of course problems with AWS also, sometimes you don’t want your site to scale uncontrollably. If you get DDoSed without mitigatiln, for example, you could end up with a huge bill for nothing.
So, as with almost everything in life. It depends what your goal is and how much you want to spend.
I use cloudflare for free. You guys pay for hosting?
I don’t host things on the open internet anymore. I have a small set of services I host for a group of friends and family and I set them up with tailscale.
On the flip side, I’ve been constantly frustrated because every time I have an idea for some little quality of life tool that involves pulling data from a site I would normally have to browse to directly, I can’t do it because everything is captcha’d to all hell.
I think http/https is dead at this point.
I think http/https is dead at this point.
Who wants to hop over to the Gemini Protocol with me? There’s even a forum
http/https works as well as it ever did, it’s just that the overwhelming quantity of new sites have gummed it up for their own purposes.
every time I have an idea for some little quality of life tool that involves pulling data from a site I would normally have to browse to directly, I can’t do it because everything is captcha’d to all hell.
On the flip side, a bunch of services / web apps (mostly paid ones) are adding APIs to become “AI native”… but you can use those APIs without having to use AI too.
I believe that this is a paraphrased quote, but “I weep for the future”.
Difficult to see, the future is, always in motion.
The Metaverse could’ve been a platform free of AI, offering a protected version of the Internet for people to be themselves. It’s kinda where we may be headed anyway. Instead we got this…
Facebook was always destined to be shit.
What we need is Tom to come back and just boot up the only MySpace servers and we can do a hard reset to the part 20 years or so.
The metaverse predates Facebook’s interest in it.
Fuck MySpace. Let’s go back to webrings.
Webrings still exist.
Dialup BBS
Don’t go that far. Do you know how long it takes to download porn at 2400 baud?
Guess you’re stuck reading erotic stories.
Probably where I got my penchant for them.
Lol, lmao even
Sorry but that is a very misinformed idea of what Metaverse was, and was supposed to beI mean, you can chill in VRChat if you want.
You mean Second Life?
Niw there’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time. Is it still actually going?
Or Resonite even.
