Did somebody say “dead internet theory”?
It’s just dumber than it was before.
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.
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.
How do you do, fellow humans? 🛹
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.
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.
Typical. Fuck it up for someone other than themselves.
Yup. Followed by the AI surveillance state. The Stasi has been digitized and never sleeps!
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?
I always wonder how much of Lemmy is just bots. Am I blissfully alone interacting with the machine? Or are you weirdos actually real?
You’re right to push back. As a Lemmy account, I can assure you that interacting with me will always feel human.
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
I’m real, but how could you “really” know?
There’s only one way : Pics or didn’t happen
Well, the number of fingers seems to be ok
I find
argumentsinteractions on lemmy go much more in-depth and feel dramatically more authentic than the responses to arguments i used to get on reddit. -That said i’m pretty sure c/political memes@lemmy.world is primarily bots. I’m also sure there are a few similar communities that are just as bad, but they appear limited.Lemmy has a small userbase that has a high percent of humans vs bots, but a lot of those people tend to be whackos. Reddit has a huge user base with way more bots and whakcos (both by percentage and raw numbers), but also more normal humans. So there’s a tradeoff there in which platform you use I suppose.
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.
There are some bots that behave like some Tracies straight from myspace, I don’t know why they’re doing this, they are just paraphrasing the memes they comment
I’m not joking
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.
And other signs of AI writing, at least for now. They may move away from that in time as people catch on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Signs of AI Writing - just grab a book on corporate way of speaking/writing e-mails and you will find it exactly the same.
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.
What happens in 18 years when the bots are all grown up?
They get put out to pasture, selling WoW gold to each other until their server goes down.
I’m a real boy!!!
Prove it
Holy shit! Who would have thought the bots would be downloading that much of porn?
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 or marketers are to dumb to tell the dif now.
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.
They arent as nice? You and I have very different tastes
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.
I tried no script for a few days but it was so frustrating that the majority of websites just flat out didn’t work I had to get rid of it.
You just have to go into no script and approve the parts that make the website function but not the ad stuff. Its a pain when you first land on a site but the browser remembers what you have allowed. So overtime you get back to normal working sites, minus ads and tracking stuff
Until you distro hop and realize that the noscript plugin migrates with your firefox profile, but not the website settings you’ve set up.
Aren’t those stored in your ~/.mozilla/firefox/profile.default/.
That would have been helpful yesterday, but thank you none the less. I’d already wiped the drive and swapped to cachyos when I realized I had to redo noscript.
Dude! We said we wouldn’t completely fuck up the Internet until next year!
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?
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.
Do bots say curse words? 😂
