this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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[–] fne8w2ah@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Did somebody say "dead internet theory"?

[–] BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

It's just dumber than it was before.

[–] ZedOnnTheGo@lemmy.zip 2 points 23 hours ago

Do bots say curse words? 😂

[–] heartSagan5@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] TheStaffmaster@lemmy.world 30 points 1 day ago (1 children)

that they expected it to eclipse real people AT ALL is both telling and slightly disturbing.

[–] Smaile@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago

really show the kind misanthropic mindset a lot of these lizard people have developed at theyre position.

[–] robocall@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

How do you do, fellow humans? 🛹

[–] Lutra@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago

Ahem... https://www.flyingpenguin.com/cloudflare-ceo-is-lying-to-you-about-the-bot-traffic-jump/

The category Prince points to as the cause contradicts him. Agentic is tiny. What actually fills the AI bucket is training scrapers, like GPTBot and ClaudeBot, pulling text to build models, which have been climbing steadily and predate his announcement. He blamed a friendly, fast-growing sliver of agents fetching pages for people and swapped in unfriendly bulk (mass scraping for training). Why? We can guess, but that is exactly the traffic his pay-to-crawl product exists to bill.

It’s a sales pitch.

And it’s based on a lie.

[–] blady_blah@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago

Holy shit! Who would have thought the bots would be downloading that much of porn?

[–] nullify3112@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago (17 children)

I always wonder how much of Lemmy is just bots. Am I blissfully alone interacting with the machine? Or are you weirdos actually real?

[–] favoredponcho@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 day ago

You’re right to push back. As a Lemmy account, I can assure you that interacting with me will always feel human.

[–] captain_oni@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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!

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[–] mangobanana@discuss.online 7 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I'm real, but how could you "really" know?

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[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] tefbo@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I feel like the incentive for corpo/astroturf/spam bots is not really there to visit fediverse. So let us remain unpopular !

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[–] BigDiction@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Just botting it up over here. Sorry dawg, blessings to your skin.

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[–] Smaile@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 day ago

that or marketers are to dumb to tell the dif now.

[–] ivanafterall@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] fenrasulfr@lemmy.world 35 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Well goodbye the internet, what advertiser is going to pay anything if they know the majority of user are bots.

[–] MyVeryRealName@lemmy.world 22 points 2 days ago (28 children)

Are advertisers absolutely necessary?

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[–] SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago

Hence the push for os level user identification and why the Zuck is behind the push.

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[–] sapphiria@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Cloudflare regularly treats me as a bot, making it difficult or sometimes impossible to access certain websites, so I'm not all that inclined to believe them here.

[–] pnelego@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is interesting too, because in theory it would be in the best interest of cloudflare for that to be the general narrative. i.e "Look how many bots there are on the internet, you really need cloud flare" or however they'd advertise that.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

Yeah this kinda fits into "CEO said a thing" journalism. Even if he's correct


and intuitively it seems like he might be


people should ask for evidence. But our corporate press is useless and/or complicit and almost never asks a follow-up question.

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[–] ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zip 259 points 2 days ago (15 children)

Oh, so dead internet is, in fact, the plan. Wonderful.

[–] mrmisses@lemmy.world 146 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Yeah but it happened a year earlier than planned!

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[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 93 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Dude! We said we wouldn't completely fuck up the Internet until next year!

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[–] placebo@lemmy.zip 22 points 2 days ago (1 children)

At least somebody is reading my blog. Thanks, bots.

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[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 116 points 2 days ago (6 children)

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

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[–] ZMoney@lemmy.world 16 points 2 days ago (3 children)
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[–] aggelalex@lemmy.world 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We successfully gave the internet schizophrenia

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[–] Satellaview@lemmy.zip 76 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (8 children)

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…

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[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Bots have now passed human traffic online

You're 20 years too late buddy.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

Human email has been a statistical anomaly since the 90s

[–] teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 54 points 2 days ago (12 children)

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.

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[–] Kaligalis@lemmy.world 33 points 2 days ago (11 children)

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.

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[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 15 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

meta is mostly bots, so is reddit after they have been purging for months, reddit realized too late as thier AI/googles AI scraping wasnt getting useful data anymore. that is why they sorta laid off directly sitewide banning.

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