Ask Lemmy

It's more like a ghoul, neither alive but dead and feeding on humans to sustain it's unholy existence.

Depends on your definition. The majority of internet traffic is already 'bots.' The big platforms seem very interested in creating AI chatbots that will give the illusion of community and friendship, or at least engagement. It's unlikely the old ways will ever fully disappear. There are still a few BBSs out there after all, but it will likely asymptotically approach 'dead' from now on.

It's hard to say on many levels. However, to keep things brief, I'd say that the "Dead Internet Theory" is no longer a theory, but rather... law.

The old internet (small privately hosted websites and blogs, organized in web rings) still exists, and may have more content than ever. It's just such a small subset of the internet now, and gets ignored by search engines, so it's hard to find.

The fact that you, a human, asked this question, and got a variety of human replies is why I would say no.

I know that the dead internet theory doesn't say that all internet activity is bots, but certainly the internet that I experience, there is abundant humanity.

However, I am a nerd who inhabits quite niche spaces, so my experience is far from the typical. Having the knowledge and stubbornness to find spaces like this puts me in a kind of bubble, where it's hard for me to gauge whether we're actually at the point of "dead internet".

In all likelihood, my answer is "no", because I need it to be. I love the internet. I grew up online, and as a very lonely child, the internet was a key part of my identity formation. As an adult, the internet is how I access community and learning. As grim as things are, I think I'm a utopian at heart.

Like I say, I realise that my online experience is far from what most people experience, and I do find it sad that most people probably do experience a much deader internet than I do. But the reason why I'm here, putting time and care into comments like this is because this is one of the ways that I am trying to keep the internet alive. "Dead" is a binary, which suggests the battle is already over. I believe the internet is dying, for sure, but I can't reconcile the notion of a dead internet with all the vibrant communities of people who are making stuff they care about, in defiance of the slop economy.

Smaller sites like niche phpBB forums are barely hanging on under the tide of spammers and crawlers (AI or otherwise). They don’t have the means to defend against what is effectively a DDoS, and are forced to increase the onboarding friction by requiring an email requesting an account or use other things like CAPTCHA or stoop to using a centralized CDN like Cloudflare.

Yes

Yeh. It’s been a zombie for a long time. Depersonalisation, censorship, monetisation, trackers, bots, inability to search. Everything’s so clinically useless.

I grew up with the knowledge that "Internet routes around damage". In those days that referred to censorship and walled gardens.

I'm not sure if and how it would work with disinformation and AI slop as the damage to route around of.

I'm cautious but hopeful.

Matter of perspective. Earlier today, I told a coworker how happy I am to have been born in the late 1980's, because it spared me from the internet culture of today: shallow, exploitative, otherizing and it encourages short term dopamine kicks. It's a breeding ground for media illiteracy, bigotry, xenophobia and narrow mindedness in general - which is ironic, since it also makes the culminated knowledge of human kind easily accessible, which has the potential to open your mind if you have internet access and if you use the internet wisely. Anyway, in a way, the internet of today is a crystalization of everything that's making me have a gloomy outlook on the future and keeping me from wanting to have children.

It's been a reality for quite a while. It's hard to pinpoint when exactly we started seeing these, but I reckon to guess they didn't start being a thing until the mid-2010s. We've had bots before on the internet, but they were regulated to being more like assistants like on IRC channels or chat rooms. Where their purpose was to be greeters or handle tasks the moderator needed to be automated.

fediverse kinda seems alive tho

I'd love to answer but there's a Captcha preventing it.

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There are places where it's dead, but also places where it's flourishing. You just gotta find the greenery among the dead brush IMO. Great time to find blogs/personal websites, and keep track of them via RSS

To some extend yes imo. What I do observe is the rising "AI" content, flooding, especially, the social media giants and around.

Bots flooding comment-sections.. I'd say things like defederation are one outcome, to somehow fortify against it. Which is totally okay.

Unless this is a bot asking the question...

Yeap, unless its a old skool sign up form, even then its pretty much an echo chamber

🔥

As a large language model, I have no opinion on this subject.

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