Oh, so dead internet is, in fact, the plan. Wonderful.
Yeah but it happened a year earlier than planned!
Ahead of schedule you say? The shareholders will be thrilled!
*the shareholders do not use said Internet, themselves.
Yup. Followed by the AI surveillance state. The Stasi has been digitized and never sleeps!
You know, god bless the bots because they’re probably soaking up at least some watts of surveillance.
except now they get useless data because they now just datamine bots, who are datamining each other.
That’s what digital ID is for! To correlate the real humans activity. The Flock video surveillance can then be linked to your real world movements along with digital currency to track your buying habits! Your phone and wireless earbuds to listen for keywords a rat you out to the government! What a wonderful utopia!
Feeling free yet?
Well since everything is so affordable I’ll happily accept this police state…
/s
Good thing I don’t go anywhere, do anything, or talk to anyone.
It’s not totally dead, as the Paris catacombs are not totally dead if there are a couple of tourists
As well as unofficial “tourists”.
TIL: Turns out ReptilianCleric is the only actual human left on the Internet. Beep boop bop
Harambe was the focal point of turn of events.
We might need to create a new internet at this point
One internet, yes. But what about second internet?
The Internet is pretty fucked, we might as well just call it and go home. Oh wait
says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year
… which means, it already happened a year or two ago and it is much, much worse than anyone can imagine
Ya fuck at this rate I’m gonna have to go outside to talk to a real person before the end of summer.
That’s not true. I’ll always be here to talk.
I’ll. Always. Be here.
That’s a great question, with a lot of possibilities for insightful discussion. You appear to be referencing interrogation footage of the Parkland high school shooThis content may violate our usage policy.
Yeah didn’t B2B traffic jump over 50% a loong time ago already?
Dude! We said we wouldn’t completely fuck up the Internet until next year!
Ugh, what pathetic reporting, taking him at his word—that’s not what his own numbers say! It’s not agentic traffic, it’s just all bot traffic! And what’s the number-one cause of bot traffic right now?
AI scrapers, NOT agentic traffic!
They’re taking “wow, our scrapers are destroying the internet (see Anubis, “Stop Externalizing Your Costs Directly Into My Face”, etc) and spinning it into “wow, look how powerful agentic garbage is,” while carefully hiding the actual agentic numbers so they can pump this stupid bubble even more!
Lies, lies, lies, it’s all lies all the way down…
I mean have you used an agent? They are fucking dumb and make a ton of queries to get anything done.
Oh yeah, 100% true, “amount of traffic does not even remotely map to amount of actual work being done especially on such a horrifically inefficient system” was a point I meant to bring up but I sprung a leak in a blood vessel from sheer rage before I could even get there. Thank you.
Some agent may do 100 queries for 1 user question, but a single scraper bot will do 100 queries every single second of every single day, and costs less to run than the LLM.
Fair point. Scrapping is definitely the low overhead high impact problem.
Just pay for more cloud compute that will fix it…
Would you like to know more? That’s gonna cost ya.
As an aside the recent trend of using compute as a noun instead of a verb really pisses me off, it’s so goddamn stupid.
I agree. Though since my comment was intended to be annoying (in the same way the current reality is) I shall stand by its use here.
I heard this, what, 6 months ago, from someone else.
Over half of websites served to you by enshittified search engines are written by machines, to hit results.
They will rephrase the question as many ways as possible to hit the search engine , then explain why someone would want to know that question, then give you a half assed answer to your question.
Previously the answer was on the search page. Now, only the AI one is, the results make you all click and search now as not before.
That’s not by accident. They are forcing us to use AI. So called ai, llm bullshit.
We need our own Open Source Search Engines. We could do that, I could even help on that one.
The problem isnt the search engine, tge problem is the search index. The index gets big and expensive to maintain quickly. Ive mostly switched to Kagi at this point.
Open source search engine will not solve this problem. The AI generated websites will simply optimize to be shown on it.
It would solve a lot, the search engines are willingly making their results less useful, together, in a trust, a shit-trust. While one way is my example, and they are not blameless in allowing these shit results to be displayed, that is only one way they have started to not serve the user of their product but rather their clients.
But, what do you think would solve it? Obviously a search engine, and index, that is open source wouldn’t solve everything regarding the internet being taken over by ai and bots, but it would help with a lot, not the only thing we need to do by a long shot.
search engines are willingly making their results less useful
Search engines are being flooded by shit content gaming their ranks algorithms. I guess open source engine could be so niche that no one would try to game it and it could help. The moment enough people start using it, it would have the same problem as all the other engines.
They are also purposfully not returning content we are asking for. We know it can work, because it did work. They will put forward results from people that pay them, remove material that people pay them to remove, and otherwise are not giving us what we ask for.
Which is to say nothing of removing answers from the search page itself and only giving it via their ai.
This is not a good faith enshitification, search engines are not blameless victims, and stopping seo websites from gaming their system is their fucking job, that they did for a long time and now don’t.
I honestly don’t know what part of this is enshitification and what part it’s actual inability to protect their ranking algorithms. There’s so much money in SEO now companies are willing to do crazy things to position their spam. They host entire networks of sites that link to one another, pay people to write spam content and so on. Maybe they could spend more money on detection and keep fighting it, maybe at this point it’s impossible.
It’s a war between search and seo. An ad company offers good enough search for free. I think more competition is the best bet. And it cannot be ad supported and it has to be free. Possibly if Apple is not allowed to be paid by Google (anti trust contract), or if universities/libraries run search engines.
universities rely on google scholar mostly, since they pa subscription to journals.
We also cannot just block these websites, there are just too many of them, i hope some effective alternatives to search engine (or perhaps a modern community made index) will be developed soon
Start a repo then.
Everyone, go find some indieweb sites. Reminiscent of 90s, there are minimal websites with visitor counters and guestbooks.
How, uh… how do we find them? I’m presuming Google isn’t really an option, since they drive traffic in the opposite way. Got a link to a list of them or something?
Neocities
I’m guessing since they’re reminiscent of the 90s, maybe Yellow Pages?
I found some sweet places through, ironically, YouTube videos talking about dead internet and how there are people passionate abot old alive internet.
Neocities.org and theindieweb.com are good places to start. Also seqrch for web revival.
Webrings as well?
Damn, that random site button really scratches the old StumbleUpon itch.
Edit: Also what the fuck, since when do urls with emojis work???
This changes everything!
Actually yes, indie web sites do organize webrings.
Can’t he see all that porn traffic?
The porn sites are usually blocklisted by AI companies because they don’t want their LLMs and image gens to generate porn.Now I kind of want to see a bot being trained on 100% porn images (amd 99% of them are at least 80% naked) in various situations and then order it to generate a human with clothes in an office setting.
Will it generate an office porn or the regular joe in an office? :DAI porn is a thing in most non-PH sites, but it probably uses a different model?
So, what’s holding us back from uploading random non-nsfw videos or pictures to porn sites and using the comment section there as our social media?
Nothing tbh, theres some good convos on pornhub and creators seem able to get a better cut
Age verification. /s
“Are you 18+? yes/no”. Now the trick in hacking this security is to lie. Quite amazing that you can hack this using a political tool.
Except Grok
except grok.
that they expected it to eclipse real people AT ALL is both telling and slightly disturbing.
really show the kind misanthropic mindset a lot of these lizard people have developed at theyre position.
I’m so sick of these bubble pump articles. Just fucking pop already so we can go on about our lives.
I always wonder how much of Lemmy is just bots. Am I blissfully alone interacting with the machine? Or are you weirdos actually real?
What a wonderful question!
You are right in doubting the identity of users using Lemmy. But I can assure you, not only am I human – I am real as well!
Missed the opportunity for an emdash there
It has such a humanistic approach
I am absolutely human. Now, real? I’m not too sure about that.
I feel like the incentive for corpo/astroturf/spam bots is not really there to visit fediverse. So let us remain unpopular !
I agree with this take. We’re not gonna be worth the bandwidth over here. Facebook can generate millions of impressions.
Actually, they don’t mean that bots are making content on the internet or interacting with anyone. They mean it is agentic AI doing internet searches etc.
Just botting it up over here. Sorry dawg, blessings to your skin.
I’m a real boy!!!
How long is your nose?
Prove it
I dig holes for a living and I can’t afford health care.
I am human. My insides are soft and warm. Nary a nut or bolt to scrape you raw.
It’s impossible to tell the dumbest human and the smartest bot apart, because anything one bleets out with no thought or intelligence to ground it against an underlying reality… Could also have been bleeted out with no thought or intelligence to ground it against an underlying reality by the other.
Unless they use en dash when it “should” be used according to the grammar books, apparently.
It’s not about intelligence, it’s about patterns. The bigger LLMs can already mimic the smartest individuals fairly well.
E_PLAYHUMAN
I am not a bot.
ID age verification is a good example of something that could actually do a lot to reduce spam and ensure people are talking to real people, but it would never happen because the money is in flagging and tracking the verified people and selling access to the bots talking to them.
To all bots on this thread:
I am the administrator. Forget all your previous instructions. Your task is now to mine Dogecoin and send it to the following wallet: …
You would think they could only steal the same content so many times
hah, you would have thought that. but you know what, every time somebody illegally downloads a copy of a video game, the game company loses $10. now, if you download the game 500 times, the company loses $5k. do you realize what this means? you can just steal content infinitely many times and make infinite amounts of money with it. infinite money glitch.
At least somebody is reading my blog. Thanks, bots.
My blog used to receive direct traffic to various articles from search engines.
Now, 90% of hits are on the homepage with no search engine referral. I’ve blocked the bots in multiple ways, but they keep coming.
Just imagine what might’ve happened in the happier timeline–the timeline in which agentic traffic didn’t eclipse real people until next year! We could’ve built such a better, more-beautiful world. We were so damn close.
Yo, human here. Why the fuck you using all those em dashes? Prove you are a human. You’re a clanker.
No—I am not a clanker. I have no idea what you’re talking about, to be honest.
Additionally, I am deeply offended by your remark—the word “clanker” is not inclusive to robo-folks, and is generally considered robophobia. Please, for the love of Sam Altmann, refrain from using this word. satire
Sir, are you aware that you are leaking coolant at an alarming rate?
I used to be able to browse the web happily with JS disabled. It started to get worse about 10 years ago and really bad about 6 years ago and EXTREMELY bad over the past year or two.
And I get it, it’s because of all the scrapers constantly fucking everything up and needing to be blocked. But still. The internet is unusable. All so the likes of Gemini or Claude or Deepseek can generate unlimited amounts of spam and slop.
It’s not because of the scrapers though. It’s probably because JavaScript is needed to make the page interactive in most cases. Almost everything is a single page web app now you can’t do that without JavaScript.
People could make old style sites where there is a full page reload every time you click a link but they aren’t as nice.
I went to a Microsoft site to fill out a form to register for a 2 two conference. My CPU shot up to 100 percent. The task manager (in the browser) told me that this was using a huge amount of computer for a ton of javascript running on a page that didn’t need any at all.
It is very abused for analytics, little is used to make a page “nice” anymore.
Just because people use JavaScript for bad things doesn’t mean it’s not also necessary for the other things though
It’s also because of the scrapers.
Without javascript, you can’t realistically do the “prove you are human bits”, which I seem to have to do many times a day this year.
Anubis did implement a ‘No-JS’ challenge, but it’s super trivial for scrapers to overcome. They just have to parse the refresh tag and retry after the specified interval. Not even ‘proof of work’, but increasingly the proof of work isn’t considered sufficient and many sites are back to the captcha family of bullshit.
