Did somebody say “dead internet theory”?
It’s just dumber than it was before.
Holy shit! Who would have thought the bots would be downloading that much of porn?
How do you do, fellow humans? 🛹
that or marketers are to dumb to tell the dif now.
Ah… so they are going to have bots make the purchase to keep the cogs of industry churn? Everything is a grift these days. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
Do bots say curse words? 😂
Culture grows exponentially
To fit t needs of technology
Naturally, mechanized bein
Grow bigr than soul creatin
A good intention uses tech
To grow outside of the net
If you are just a cyber man
Then the Borg is your plan
So be as Christ was and is
Why don’t you create ur biz
Fish an’ bread how do feed
Oh fulfill society’s big need
Infinite power availabl now
Become God or I tell u how
Then I be what you do obey
But ‘I’ is which pyramid say
Is this a poem and if so what’s the name and author?
Me, Victorious Phoenix. Name, I dunno, The After-effects of Perceiving and Undoing the Karmic Fetters that Bind One to the Existence-illusion Complex. I am attracting attention to my educational (f)art project God trained me for and makes me do.
Oh, so dead internet is, in fact, the plan. Wonderful.
We might need to create a new internet at this point
One internet, yes. But what about second internet?
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.
Typical. Fuck it up for someone other than 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.
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?
The amount of malware from these bots is insane, guys.
It’s fucking up the internet in ways most don’t understand.
Dude! We said we wouldn’t completely fuck up the Internet until next year!
Until AFTER the big AI company IPOs, eh? Well, sucks to suck
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.
A lot of times their training is lacking in whatever I’m trying to get them to do, so I have to direct them to read particular web pages in order to have a clue what they’re supposed to be parroting.
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.
And it has to be fast. If it takes too long people will leave before it gives results, and thats also expensive.
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.
Give Marginalia search a try, see how well it works out for you.
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 haven’t tried them at all but kagi claims to focus on smaller sites first, which would more likely include what they’re referencing
Thank ya. I remember my favorite times with the internet being those when I had a list of small sites I’d check each day. I’d like to rebuild that :)
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!They work, but they probably shouldn’t. I use one for url shortening and I love it, whilst its sometimes a pain at the same time.
Actually yes, indie web sites do organize webrings.
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.
Well goodbye the internet, what advertiser is going to pay anything if they know the majority of user are bots.
Are advertisers absolutely necessary?
Advertisers are essentially subsidizing many businesses. Costs are higher than you think and most products we enjoy are expensive.
Yes, there is FOSS, but you’re essentially fucking lucky that people that work on those want to do this from the passion they have. Most people don’t, and won’t, do shit like that for free. Hell, look at many here on the internet that want products for free and are unwilling to pay or even do minimal donations for things that they already like.
Like it or not, most people want to be fucking paid for their time and FOSS, as great as it can be, is not the norm for most talent. We can make counter arguments and hate on capitalism, but that is the reality, and until entire cultures change then this is what it is and advertisers are sort of necessary evil in most cases.
Lots of FOSS developers are paid by companies. At least people working on the major projects.
My question is whether websites need to be owned by businesses.
No but the end of internet advertising will basically be the end of many internet professions that are already struggling. Like writers and editors. So only hobbyists and the lucky few who have enough fame to get paid via Patreon will be making certain websites.
Tbf that’s how it was a couple decades ago. Also, writers and editors aren’t internet professions. They can go back to newspapers.
Even all those websites that are serving content illegally, like porn and game pirating sites, only can afford to stay up because of advertising.
It can’t cost that much to host a piracy website. Worst case scenario, we go to Telegram.
Few online platforms flourish without advertisers. Practically all our content on lemmy comes from sites with advertising.
I’m sure people would create content even if they didn’t make anything. They did in the past.
mmhmm, give us your top 10 Peertube reccomendations :)
Top 5 recommendations uploaded on YouTube before monetization:
- Me at the zoo
- Chocolate rain
- Charlie bit my finger
- Rickroll
- Diet coke and mentos
The trick with that was that there was no monetization yet. That cat’s out of the bag.
Seriously, there are multiple platforms out there with no monetization, and they’re hardly used.
The cat can be put back into the bag. They’re hardly used because there are multiple platforms out there with monetization. They only lose to the competition.
I just tried to sign up for Peertube because this comment reminded me
The only site with any videos on it (Fediverse.TV) doesn’t allow signups. Neither does the default instance (Peertube.TV).
Tragically, Web3 cryptoshit MAHA platform “Odyssey” was much more functional when I tried to use it, before realizing what kind of content dominated there.
EDIT: Finally found one that let me create an account:
Why create an account?
As you’ve probably noticed, creating an account is not necessary to watch videos on Tube Free.
However, creating an account on Tube Free will allow you to:- Comment on videos
- Subscribe to channels and receive notifications of new videos
- Have access to your watch history
…So even with an account, I can’t upload videos?
you can, there are hundreds of nodes. to be fair there are probably 10’s of thousands of videos, but … they’re almost all poor quality or just uninteresting
If all my time there i’ve found a couple music channels and a couple of linux people. There’s no money in it, so none of the creators put any real time into anything over there.
There’s tons of creators on YouTube who post content without receiving any money just for the joy of the game.
well, i’ve posted quite a lot of original memes here.
and thank you for your service!
Maybe advertisers are bots too?
Yes because people are cheap.
Not necessarily. Sometimes people just can’t afford to pay websites.
Literally everything on the internet is paid for by advertising. And without it every site you rely upon will either become a subscription service or simply disappear because it is expensive to run a website.
Why is it so expensive to run a website?
Scale.
Running a website is very cheap, like $5 a month
Running a huge website with millions of users is expensive
it depends a lot on the website
1 user on peertube consumes more bandwidth than 100 users on lemmy
Also salaries. Like the people who make the content also need to get paid.
Because bandwidth isn’t free.
Server hosting - is my understanding. It takes a lot of resources to host a site.
Hence the push for os level user identification and why the Zuck is behind the push.
Maybe getting rid of those invasive ads is a good thing.
They pay to run ads because it makes them look better for investors who are all stupid people who have inherited JUST enough money to keep them from from ever failing at making money. More ads mean more stock value.
That’s why there are MORE ads than ever even though the number of viewer-per-ad is plummeting.
Its just one more example of the infinite money printing machines that are about to break the world. All the obviously ruinous bad stuff that is being allowed to happen despite the constant warning sirens is tied to these runaway money printing schemes.
