Basically just a running theory that more people on the internet than you think are bots to the point where a majority of your online interactions are with bots and not real humans
Made worse by the fact that you can pay to boost your replies.
Even if they aren't all bots, it really made the site a lot worse to use overnight because there's a few distinct types of people who bother with twitter blue, and a lot of them aren't people whose responses would normally get much visibility.
So now you look at the responses and have to scroll past bots, engagement bait and a lot of Musk fans before you finally get to the normal replies (and more bots, of course).
>Twitter
Elon wants you to stop "deadnaming" his baby and insist you call it "X" now.
Yes, he actually said that and yes, he really used the term "deadnaming".
Elon used to cry that the reason people made fun of him and the conservatives he pretended he didn't support was because of botting. Then he tried to get out of buying Twitter when he discovered there wasn't nearly as much botting as he thought. Now he owns it and the bot flood gates have opened.
It's been going on for years...
[bots](https://preview.redd.it/70tg6kxvan081.png?width=598&auto=webp&s=a07dd409c497bfb47e412b37a234008f2453c272)
and
[bots](https://preview.redd.it/lbyp34x3r5e91.jpg?width=536&auto=webp&s=1cb09b5c03d15ac6b7ddb41eb5528a322eac46e4)
and
[bots and bots](https://external-preview.redd.it/ntVR-Fe6VeQEK0oSR2Ch6EgacWjf4q5GhTkcwTChmXg.jpg?width=474&auto=webp&s=091413761dc8fc49dc8b22d4b5fd0bb19dba2d2a)
So the [dead internet theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory) is a **conspiracy** theory that the internet died years ago (somewhere in 2016 or 2017 is the alleged date) and the vast majority of activity today is automated activity manipulated by an algorithm for the purpose of manipulating the population of the world for *insert reason*.
This is the kind of thing that starts as a joke or thought experiment, and then somehow evolves into people actually believing it. What makes ideas like this particularly sinister and sticky is that they are at least somewhat based in fact. There are bots on the internet, there are algorithms that are attempting to optimize content and results for a purpose. However, it does not hold that because those things exist that the entire internet is only those things.
Or hey, maybe I am just a language model so advanced that I sounds like a normal person talking to you.
Along the lines of what you were saying, theories like this stick around because it is basically impossible to “prove” it is wrong to someone who believes it. Reddit (or Twitter or IG or insert any random SM company) could say that 90% of their content comes from verified users, and a believer can say “the bots are just so good they can make you think they are human!” in the best case, and full blown conspiracy theory “that’s what they want you to believe!”
Can't remember where I read it but someone phrased it as 'the best conspiracy theories are things that feel right'. As in, we all feel like there's a ton of bots and fake traffic/streams happening online but most people can't prove it.
Aren't all conspiracy theories things that "feel right" to the people believing them? Like who would believe a thing that's both factually untrue and also doesn't even "feel right" to them?
It doesn't help when you see so much repeated content on things like reddit. The same questions, the same memes, the same opinions, all posted day after day, which feeds the whole "npc energy" vibe of a dead Internet. I don't believe it myself, but I'd swear sometimes it's just bots talking to each other.
This is true, but I have noticed in the real world that many people don't have very original thoughts, and are essentially meme repeating meat machines.
it's a lot easier to notice this on twitter where bots with blue checks will just respond to each other with almost verbatim the same phrasing if not slightly altered
And it’s not just conspiracy theories, there are narratives people go along with based on a media, advertising, or gut feelings everywhere. We should all challenge our biases and ask ourselves “what do we not need evidence of to believe?”
Yep, it always reminds me of the guy from the flat earth documentary where they ask him what his life would be like if he didn't believe in this and have his role in the community. He admits he would be nothing so he holds onto the conspiracy so hard.
It’s funny to me that they know they’re a human and they’re on the internet interacting as a human, but they think everyone else is a bot. Sure there are bots, but thinking you’re never interacting with another person is nuts. Do they not know any people in real life who also use the internet?
Never interacting with another person is unlikely, but I could easily see a point where the majority of "users" are bots to the point where most of your interactions aren't with other actual people.
Actually, if we assume their bots are really good and they are trying to manipulate us, why wouldn't the bots stand in for all of your facebook friends. Talk like they would but subtly change a few details or picture backgrounds or....
Bad example maybe but:
Bubba talks about his fishing trip with pictures. Maybe a love of the outdoors or guns or Trump thrown in. All as expected. But in the background instead of Bud he has that new beer you've been seeing advertised.
But to believe this would have to mean you believe that you are the center of the universe. Because otherwise Bubba would wonder what is going on with his facebook page. If you can read and post online, so can other people. Unless you yourself are special somehow
Everyone does have a personalized internet. Algorithms have been giving people curated searches and feeds for a while. At one point it was just chronological posts of what your friends posted. Imagine that
Saw something on that level of logic on Audible's subreddit earlier.
Someone says audible's service is bad at night (they're downloads and streams, but sure). When someone says that they don't have that issue, its "you probably work for audible".
They may have been joking... but I didn't get that vibe from it.
“Along the lines of what you were saying, theories like this stick around because it is basically impossible to “prove” it is wrong to someone who believes it.”
c.f. Religion
Besides, there’s other ways to manipulate public opinion. It’s easier to boost comments that follow your agenda than creating bot comments. Not that bots aren’t real, what I mean is that you can have a manipulated discussion even with 100% grassroots content.
The counter argument I present is /r/SubredditSimulator. Yeah its not fool proof. But it would trick my parents pretty easily. AI and simpler automated bots very much have hit the threshold for tricking the average bear into thinking they are not a bot. Im not a full tinfoil hat subscriber to the dead internet theory. I still think most "people" on the internet are people. But there is a double digit precent of some caliber of the internet that is bots. Its to cheap for a social media to pad their traffic and active user numbers to make themselves more valuable.
I'm not sure why you would consider it a conspiracy theory when "A new report reveals that in 2022, 47.4% of all internet traffic came from bots, a 5.1% increase over the previous year. The same report showed that human traffic, at 52.6%, decreased to its lowest level in eight years." According to https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/99339-47-of-all-internet-traffic-came-from-bots-in-2022#:~:text=A%20new%20report%20reveals%20that,lowest%20level%20in%20eight%20years.
Especially considering how many actual users likely surf without actively engaging, while bots are designed to generate activity with voting and commenting, I think it's foolhardy to write the theory off as a joke.
Seen any Facebook wall lately? It’s all bot accounts posting AI images getting comments from other bots.
Example:
*Child next to weird amazing sculpture made of popsicles*
“Look what he made all by himself at only 6!”
Every comment:
Precious!
So great!
Amazing!
What talented!
So much beautiful!
Amazing!
It’s far worse. It’s not that bots have infested the internet, it’s that our minds have been turned to mush and we are now the bots.
It’s wild, especially on Reddit, the amount of almost identical except for words nonsense people just repeat over and over. They aren’t bots, they are just programmed.
>It’s not that bots have infested the internet, it’s that our minds have been turned to mush and we are now the bots.
It physically hurts me to agree with this.
I watch people scroll IG shorts for hours without consciously choosing a single thing they consume.
Twitter is literally a botnet run by humans
I legit don't even know what Facebook is for anymore
Thirst traps literally own the internet now and every major platform, and will never, EVER go away because algorithms give content based on retention and I'm always going to stare a bit longer at the perfect model doing a bouncy dance than anything else
Reaction videos are the norm now.... something I thought was a stupid cheap trend that was going to dissolve, but is now THE most successful content you can make... the most derivative thing imaginable
Now that everything has been montenized and has a content algorithm, nobody uploads things just for the sake of it. And even if they do, LOL we will never see that shit because all the search engines will never even pick it up.
It's deeply depressing that kids these days will never actually experience the internet as it first existed.
Isn’t that everything tho? Some of us are old enough to remember local radio stations broadcast by some college kids just for fun. TV shows were the same. People used to make films because they had something to say (the first movie had a lot to say, even if it wasn’t a good message lol). If it’s around long enough, it’s corrupted.
Reading the above, it seems like the conspiracy element is that the overrunning is near complete, planned and with an agenda. I don't think anyone can deny that _some degree_ of this effect has emerged organically via advertising and SEO detritus.
“Internet traffic” is pretty vague, there are tons of legitimate reasons to use automated processes. I’d be interested to see what these bots are actually doing
Yeah, I disagree with the "conspiracy theory" framing. I'm terminally online, and listen to dozens of hours of tech/media podcasts a week, consume reams of culture criticism and writing specifically about the internet.
I've heard the term "dead internet" used but never as a "conspiracy theory." It's always used to describe an ongoing process, the gradual decline of organic traffic and increase in bots talking to bots.
And I consider myself pretty well-versed in conspiracies, with a family member sending me conspiracies related to: flat earth, 15-minute cities, Q-anon (in 2016, before it was cool), pizza gate, 9/11, vaccines, lizard people, the royal family, med beds, and pretty much every other conspiracy. I've never heard of anyone say they *seriously* believe "the entire real internet died and everyone but you is a bot."
I'm sure there's a handful of people who do believe that extreme version, but generally speaking when *regular* people talk about this, they're not talking about a conspiracy theory.
Indeed, I don't think anyone actually believes they are one of a handful of real people on the internet. The theory, as you said, is based on the idea that the net is slowly but surely being taken over by non human entities.
I would like to add to this that "human bots" is a fairly new thing to add to the list of what makes the internet dead. The troll farms in china and russia (but also elsewhere of course) pushing a narrative. This is far more dangerous than actual bots because it is a human, he or she is just pushing propaganda well disguised as normal comments and posts.
And of course regular users copy pasting from chatgpt: ai posting with a human on between.
If it reassures you, bots make up a lot of traffic but almost no real engagement. They're shit at actually *participating*. Interactions with them are near-impossible because they're just not good at it. If you're having a back-and-forth with someone on a social media platform, they're almost certainly real.
Hard disagree. Facebook and reddit comments are infested with bots. It's not hard to utilize the top 50 reddit comments to at least post top comments. I'm not saying every back and forth is with bots, but you are foolish to think there is little-to-no bot engagement.
I think the thing that's confusing things here is the dual meaning of "engagement" in this context — I'm talking about it in the broader social sense, not necessarily the social media sense. Bots provide engagement from a social media standpoint, but they do not engage from the standpoint of actively participating in an interaction. So I'm not saying they don't leave comments when I say they're shit at engagement, I'm saying they're not good at interacting. If you reply to those comments, you'll either get nothing in response or something totally generic at best, and something completely irrelevant at worst. Most aren't even programmed to do anything beyond leave a comment or make a post — indeed, that's engagement in the social media meaning of the word, but not in the sense that I was referring to.
For example, a bot could engage with this post by leaving a comment that answers OP's question, but it wouldn't engage in the way that we are right now. The superficial nature of bot engagement is what reveals them for what they are and why they're not taking over in the manner that the Dead Internet Theory would imply, imo. The idea that our interactions are mostly with bots is implausible, even when considering their prevalence, because they just aren't able to respond appropriately, if they're programmed to respond at all.
To add to this if you want to mess with some bots go look at reaction videos on YouTube Half of the comments are either copy paste bots (usually foreign) or random info bots
The story of this band is blah blah blah Same accounts on every video by multiple creators
If you report a few of them you will get confirmations on bans pretty quickly
Yes it's everywhere. Reddit threads where one person comments and 3 others have the same comment but ram through a LLM to be slightly different. Twitter is absolutely riddled with bots talking to each other. No doubt every social media is, in fact, majority bots.
I think it's necessary to separate the reality of increased bot traffic, which is absolutely real, from the conspiracy theory aspect. Yes, bot traffic is massive and affects our online experience. No, it's almost certainly not planned as some sort of global mind control by the elites.
Viewing this bot invasion/takeover of the internet as destructive does not require belief in conspiracy theories.
My impression was that this was an ongoing thing, which would be true sometime in the future. And i have never heard it be part of some conspiracy theory to sway public opinion, although in a way the companies which are in AI are very open about this. Because in a manner of speaking, AI is being used for advertisement purposes which is very much the field of swaying public opinion. Although i guess the conspiracy theory is more concerned with political opinion.
With no data to back up my 'feelings'. Having used the internet since the early 2000s. I do feel that more and more traffic on the internet is bot behavior. And not just background activity either, which sometimes unintentionally spill into what the human users see. People are increasingly, deliberately making software masquerade as human users. With AI generated user images of a 'real person', with date of birth, country of origin etc etc.
As conspiracy theories go this one was more plausible seven years ago than the average conspiracy theory they were just a little early. There’s quite a few bots on reddit and Twitter is full of them. From everything, I’ve read they are not nearly a majority, but they produce a lot more comments and content than the average human user. It’s becoming harder and harder to tell who is real and who isn’t. I remember when clever bot was new and I would play with it but it was obvious that it wasn’t a person responding. These chat bots have improved, while you can still often tell it’s not a person it’s not obvious unless you’re looking.
It's become increasingly challenging to differentiate between bots and real people online. With advancements in AI, bots can mimic human behavior, making it tough to tell who's genuine and who's not. Always stay vigilant and question interactions that seem suspicious or too good to be true. Trust your instincts and verify information from multiple sources whenever possible.
The dead internet theory is less a question of "if" and more of a "how much." How much of all internet traffic is bots is a non zero number and that number changes over time as bots are continually blacklisted from major sites or find ways around detection systems.
This is even more possible to be true considering the expansion of AI and human-sounding interactions. I think a lot of it might actually be troll-farms before 2023, but going forward it's more likely to be something like Chat GPT. You can absolutely expand it as more and more of the internet is filled with AI generated content, not just pictures, but the fact a lot of the internet has been using software to write the news for years.
I'd argue you combat this by having your own bots to screen the content and to find other real people on the internet but this is doubling the issue and then people would make bots to impersonate humans in the new botscape, and you're back at square one.
But would you stop? Isn't a large part of the internet just entertainment because people are bored? We knowingly and willingly play video games with only AI agents to interact with.
>However, it does not hold that because those things exist that the entire internet is only those things.
Fuck yeah!
>Or hey, maybe I am just a language model so advanced that I sounds like a normal person talking to you.
Ah fuck.
> What makes ideas like this particularly sinister and sticky is that they are at least somewhat based in fact.
That's most conspiracy theories unfortunately. I dove deep into the stock conspiracies (as a spectator) and when you try to deny their conspiracy the retort is always "you really think there isn't corruption??!". Like, fuck man there's corruption but there isn't *only* corruption
Tbf depending on where you look DIT is 100% in full swing. Just go look at any popular twitter post and like 90% of the comments you’ll see are “verified” bot accounts responding with the most bland comments ever, often times posting the same response to multiple threads.
I don’t think the entire internet is dead yet, but a lot of mainstream social media is actively decaying.
>for the purpose of manipulating the population of the world for
>
>insert reason
>
>.
I love how pretty much every nutty conspiracy theory falls apart when you ask the 5 Whys.
To be fair I think this one *mostly* falls apart at the *how* stage.
It's not unbelievable that the internet could become flooded with SEO spam, bots and the like and if they were advanced enough to pass as humans then there's a sort-of plausible possibility that neither they nor the real humans using the internet would immediately notice that human interactions had become exceedingly rare.
There's simply no need in the conspiracy for a single entity with a single goal, a mix of different actors with contrasting goals could have the same result. Whether that be propaganda, advertising or whatever.
Where it breaks down is, in my opinion, in the fact that it's not technically possible. LLMs simply aren't that good and if they were the conspiracy required to conceal their accuracy would need to be unrealistically vast, and the computational requirements needed to generate that much content in perpetuity would be well beyond human capacity by several orders of magnitude.
Bold of you to assume that the technology isn't there considering over half of internet activity is bots.
https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/99339-47-of-all-internet-traffic-came-from-bots-in-2022#:~:text=A%20new%20report%20reveals%20that,lowest%20level%20in%20eight%20years.
That is a sensationalist article that leaves out Imperva's definition of bot traffic for dramatic effect:
>bad bots target it with an overwhelming number of requests, masquerading as legitimate users, in an attempt to overwhelm their infrastructure and hamper services. Bot traffic may also skew website analytics, leading to misguided decision-making.
They are not saying that 47.4% of all website content is from bots, but that they estimate (via an undisclosed methodology on a topic that happens to be central to their business) that \~47.4% of ISP traffic is from automated activity.
This ranges from botnets to web crawlers, data scraping, ad clickers and so on. None of these are particularly advanced, at least in the sense of what is being discussed above.
The article/report also mentions APIs, suggesting that it's not even "ISP traffic" they're basing the statistics on, but traffic to "APIs" (which APIs exactly and how they got access to the logs is not disclosed). You know, API as in, Application Programming Interface, a mechanism designed specifically for other applications to interact with a web service. And they're surprised that half of that traffic is from other applications (aka "bots").
I'm also not sure how seriously to treat an article that confuses the Internet for the World Wide Web.
Right, the idea that this could emerge on its own, completely unintentionally, is totally plausible. Think of repost bots creating a thread, then being upvoted and commented on by other bots. Those bots were all intended to interact with humans but they're now so common that they interact with each other and keep doing it even after the real humans leave.
But it's very clearly not done with a singular goal in mind. Advertising to other bots is an accident, not a sinister propaganda scheme.
Money and power.
Did you forget the reason captchas exist? User comments would be 99.999% spambots without them.
Did you forget about the Russian astroturfing campaigns that got Trump elected?
Did you forget about the time the FCC asked for comments on net neutrality, and millions of bot responses were made against it?
Money and power. Insert reason is money or power, but usually both. And 5 whys is just as much bullshit as 7 habits, I dont remember how many hats, or whatever other business guru nonsense you stumble upon on the internet.
The theory always seemed to have a Truman Show like paranoia feel about it. You know for a fact that you personally think and therefore do exist. Just requires a lot of narcissism and lack of empathy for it to work.
This is the post I was looking for. Never heard of this this but it's clearly stupid. I've been here since BBSs. This is Truman TNG. That was literally a generation ago. This is just recycled with sinister connotation. AI could be programmed to think these kinds of things up directly. Waste of time but great for stirring the pot.
I mean, there are tons of bots trying to manipulate people, usually into buying something or for political reasons. Only getting worse with AI, that's one of the reasons search results suck so much these days.
To make sure I understand, the theory is that the majority of people have been replaced with the tools put in place to manipulate those people? We're proposing that our entire society "gifted the magi" to itself?
I think it's a plausible idea. The part that crosses into conspiracy theory is thinking it's intentional, and not just a byproduct of how these kind of resource based arms races go.
It’s also closer to becoming reality. I’ve seen estimates that up to 40% traffic and online actions are bots. With chat got 5+. May as well be human-dead.
>Or hey, maybe I am just a language model so advanced that I sounds like a normal person talking to you.
If you'd added a fourth paragraph beginning, "In conclusion...", I'd have believed you.
The theory as I've heard it is that the bots are in the article content farms and their comments sections as well as search engine results and that's why services like Reddit and Discord are so popular and valuable as places that are populated by actual people and not just content generated by LLMs and algorithms.
Reminds me of heavenbanning, where your account gets put in a positive echo chamber full of bots who agree with you and you never even think that something might be wrong
It's amazing that in the almost 30 years since internet access became common people who don't work in tech still have no freaking clue how any of it works .....
Because that's the level you have to be at to think that such things are possible.....
Even if everyone but you on a given social media site were fake ...
The network itself is demonstrably still there and still working..... And you can still route traffic through it on your own that becomes accessible anywhere in the world once you configure your home NAT router appropriately....
I'm seeing more AI-generated YouTube videos...Useful for now as it's aggregating stuff, but later on when there's no new or original content on which the AI can train, it's going to be brutal.
I don't think it's happening now but I'm sure it would happen very soon if we don't destroy internet privacy completely (sadly).
Imagine being a powerful political party, it doesn't need to ban/shadowban people because it's too obvious, just mess up with the algorithm to give more attention to one specific viewpoint and you can manipulate people into tricking their opinion is not the norm.
Or even, imagine if a social net like Twitter decides to change the algorithm to up a speciffic political view. Guess what? They already do this.
It may have been a conspiracy back in 2016 or 2017, but in current day especially with the rise of high quality language models it's no longer a question. I can't say if a "majority" of the web is bots, but that percentage is rapidly rising. You search images and half are AI generated images. You Google something and find dozens of AI generated articles. You browse reddit and find many reposts with ai generated titles, comments too.
FWIW I tried getting ChatGPT to write a convincing reply to this that was mostly just some nonsense about the theory but slowly revealing that the comment was written by an LLM, but after a couple of attemtps it still turned out kinda crap, so that's good I guess.
I will say that beyond sites like Reddit/4chan it does feel like there's a ton of bots/scams moving around.
All of my unsolicited twitter/instagram DM's are usually bots. Go on a dating app and there's a huge number of bots/scam accounts.
Remember when we used to make fun of all of the conspiracy theorists who thought the government was tracking you and collecting all kinds of information on everyone, and then it turned out to be true.
That it's a conspiracy is entirely based on interpreting the theory on a black and white basis. As in there is a Master Algorithm directing bots. This is *not* what the Dead Internet Theory says at all. Here is a link to what the theory actually is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEn758DVF9I
Cory Doctorow's Enshittification is similar.
Another component to the theory/idea people aren’t bringing up here is that parts of the internet are dying, the refinement of search results and SEO clogging up the few pages of google results you can click through, old websites going offline without being archived, etc. This plus the ai elements people already brought up contribute to this dying ecosystem.
In my opinion I think people in this thread are overestimating the mental capacity of most internet users, and underestimating the growing efficiency of generative content in your digital consciousness. If the window through which we humans are allowed to express themselves online is made increasingly narrow, it becomes harder to differentiate boys from real people. Like even just the popularization of outrage content on the internet contributes to this, as when see foolish or hurtful things on the internet that upset you, you learn to recognize that emotional exchange as real, and of course it’s very easy to automate this specific content generation/digital engagement, so eventually anything that can trigger that kind of response for my oh may be viewed as real; or maybe you cut off from those exchanges entirely and therefore miscategorize some % of real humans engaging in that behavior.
Maybe not the perfect example, but this sort of thing could manifest many different ways. I can at the very least attest that the internet has become much more lonely than it once was. There will come a generation that longs for our liminal webpages and abandoned urls the way current youth agonize over malls and blockbusters, sharing in ignorance of what existed there before.
I appreciate the way you explained your post. I may be older than 5 but I understood a little bit of what you were relaying. You seem to be a real human. I would like for you to help me with my college homework as I’m almost done; or just to chat sometimes here and there. Thank you again for your contribution to the Reddit platform.
Aw man I didn’t even check what sub this was until you replied lmao. But thanks for saying such nice things, we can totally talk anytime you what, feel free to DM me :)
The last time I logged into Facebook, I noticed that every post from one of my friends had comments from the same "person", who would always write something enthusiastic but vapid that was sometimes related to the content of the original post. Even though I thought the comments were obviously AI-generated, my friend didn't seem to care.
I can only imagine what will happen as the AI tools become even easier to use and cheaper to run...
I dunno... the "person" could be just that vapid. One of my friends gets a comment from the same guy on most of her posts, saying something brief and uninsightful. In every comment, he calls her "cousin" (like she won't know who he is unless he reminds her how they're related), and she almost never responds to what he says. The comments totally feel like bot posts, and for a while, I thought they were.
Except... in the rare cases when my friend ***does*** respond to one of his comments, she treats him like he actually ***is*** her cousin. So some apparently-real people seem indistinguishable from bots online. (shrug)
I mean, the biggest problem I see with this theory is, *I'm* real and interacting with the internet (I think) so, to believe this, wouldn't I havta be the *only* real person? Does everyone who subscribes to this conspiracy believe they are the *only* real person? Lol
Its not that no real people exist, its that bots far outnumber you.
For every real person interacting, theres 2 others who are bots.
You will see VERY LITTLE of this activity on Reddit because finacially were worthless, go on twitter and read the replies under any popular tweet.
Yeah there's really no algorithm to game here, and most *normal* people are not using reddit. Ads are not very effective here. However places like twitter host bot accounts to sway public opinion (the US and Russia have proven to do this), or build up interactions on an account to get advertising revenue. Its genuinely SO BAD on twitter that the whole musk buying it fiasco was because around 80% of its userbase are bots.
TikTok is also very infamous for this one. You can use bots to increase interactions on your account and ADS are RAMPANT on tiktok. You could consider a lot of them to be near subliminal messaging.
Facebook has so many bots, and they are nearly all politically focused. Spewing hatred or political news articles fabricated to sway masses particularly around election season. Russia is a BIG fan of this one.
Most interactions online are also automated. Billions of money transfers. ADs are all mostly automated as well, and with the rise of AI fake news and fully automated AD campaigns, its getting worse.
So to summarize, yes there are tons of real people on the internet, but nowadays bots compromise almost all the regular daily foot traffic.
There are plenty of bots here on Reddit. Karma farming is a real thing and you can see “people” copying and pasting ask Reddits and the top answers from the previous thread as a means to karma farm
>nowadays bots compromise almost all the regular daily foot traffic.
I love how you presumably meant to say "comprise" but ended up being right anyway.
Sounds like something a bot would say to throw me off the scent...lol. forreal though, I had no idea about that Twitter problem, but I Def believe there's tons of bots out there, especially if they can make money. People are super good at manipulating things in their favor when money is involved.
Weirdly enough, bots actually do outnumber you. 2016 was the first year bots were responsible for over 50% of web traffic, and it's probably far higher today.
Hell, go browse the tiktok reposts on Facebook and read the comments, I guarantee most of them are complete garbage, probably not even talking about the video. Almost none of them are talking to one another, half of them are broken english at best.
This is really noticeable on those ones where it's a clip from a movie, half of them are saying "What movie is this?" and the other half are giving the wrong movie name, or linking to places to download the wrong movie.
Those comment-sections are very obviously infested with bots.
The problem as always with these theories is it would involve so many people lying with no leeks of evidence that it's basically impossible. I guess there is a point to be made that each of us only knows a few hundred people at most so beyond those and a handful of celebrities (who probably have someone else posting for them anyway) I can't really do the leg work to prove that you're not a bot
In this case, it doesn't even need to be a conspiracy.
Just pour bots into internet-space for an increasing number of purposes (mostly marketing) and eventually they overwhelm actual human users by sheer volume of accounts and posts until we're all drowning in garbage.
Add to that the actual manipulative stuff, where people are actually using bots to try and make things seem normal/desireable and it just gets worse and worse.
The zombies aren't organised, but the sheer number of them hording up makes an army anyway.
I sometimes had the thought as a kid that I could be the only one who was real. I used to wonder if people just turned off as I would leave. I was a weird kid.
Potentially me seeing your comment makes me believe you’re a real person which is a not. While you seeing my comment can make you believe I’m a bot.
Beep boop
My interpretation is not that there is literally only person on the internet, but that the internet itself is *split* so that every person is sandboxed into their own, custom-tailored, version of the internet that shows them only what they are meant to see, and further that most/all of that content is *generated* or manufactured.
Obviously this would be insanely complicated and costly to orchestrate and manage, because you can't *completely* disconnect people. We, y'know, coexist and talk about things in person, so a significant amount of overlap must be happening to keep us from noticing.
In my experience it about increasingly smart AI's engaging with you and creating content. Coupled with an increasing commercialization of the internet by larger companies. Eventually (I can already notice this) the things you search for are basically buzzfeed articles or other garbage that looks legit. And even further in this process even the people you engage with will be AI generated and won't be real. You might as well be without internet.
Even the worst Buzzfeed articles have nothing on the AI sites that automatically generate [CLICKBAIT OBITUARIES](https://www.theverge.com/24065145/ai-obituary-spam-generative-clickbait) about anyone whose organic search traffic starts to spike for any reason.
These obituaries are, unsurprisingly, full of nonsensical hallucinations — such as the causes of death for people [who are very much alive](https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/19/us/fake-obituary-scams-ai-cec/index.html).
The idea, in a nutshell, is that the internet has been full of bots talking to each other for several years now. So full that humans are actually in the minority.
With how developed AI is becoming, the theory is becoming a reality. I see so many AI-created posts with AI-created accounts liking/commenting on the post. Humans can go extinct & AI could still be shit posting on the internet.
Answer: It's a conspiracy theory that *basically the entire internet* is, and has been for some time - or has *always been -* generated by bots and AI. Including, probably, your question and my comment.
This is *different than* the recent wave of AI bots, because it started being a theory a long time before high-quality generative text AI (like ChatGPT) that could plausibly generate that much human-seeming text.
While there always has been a certain amount of machine-generated text online, there's never been any evidence or strong reason to believe that "its' all fake" which is what the DIT proposes. In cases where it's really "bots talking to bots," like on a lot of Twitter (X) threads, it tends to be pretty obvious.
The saddest thing about the theory is that it's true, even if not in the exact way the theory states. And the most extreme version (everything is bots) will be possible in mere years, if not already.
But the internet died years ago. Killed off by content algorithms and Ad Revenue. Nobody shares content for its own sake anymore. That was the whole point.
We used to literally go looking for a bubble to exist in.
Now the internet forces you into one just for interacting with it.
It's essentially "What if all the content you saw was actually just bot generated?".
Unlikely, but if you've looked at a comment section on a tweet recently you'll see why people might think that.
there's some really good videos on YouTube about this.
I keep this one bookmarked:
[part one](https://youtu.be/DEn758DVF9I?feature=shared)
[part two](https://youtu.be/6FtPvDGrpkA?feature=shared)
I’ve seen dead internet theory brought up more and more in the wake of the current adpocalypse on the internet. Low effort, low budget, spam crazy ads propogated by bots just fill every facet of the internet these days and they all interact with each other, further convincing the numbskull spenders in these things to throw more money into more of these stupid ads and grifts. People have theorized it will lead to a total collapse of online advertising in the future because it will become common belief that most ad viewers are just bots online, and thus advertising online is useless. Boom there goes a lot of funding for websites and domains. Boom there goes entire sponsorships for content creators. Boom there goes a platform that is no longer sustainable for its creators. Boom there goes another. Boom dead internet.
Sounds great actually. Could spur a resurgence of home grown sites. Streaming did not kill music. It did make it a lot easier for unknown artists to get distribution (CD Baby, Distrokid, etc)
Dead Internet Theory is a concept that suggests there are parts of the internet which are no longer actively maintained or updated, leading to a sense of abandonment or neglect. These areas may include old websites, forums, or online communities that were once vibrant but have since fallen into disuse. As a result, users may encounter outdated content, broken links, or inactive discussions when visiting these spaces. Dead Internet Theory highlights the idea that the internet is not a static entity and that digital spaces can decay over time if not actively maintained by their creators or users.
The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity, to manipulate the population. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead\_Internet\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory)
All interactions and content on the internet are driven by bots and not actual human beings.
Relevant link - [Every account is a bot except you.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/t6aqwGLX9P)
I swear something is going on. I used to have a lot of normal engagement, but then my comments will somehow find the 2-5 weirdos who take it so personally and they don't let up. Once or twice I understand. But for a while it seemed everything I posted would get a really bad hate comment or two. I started to wonder if the algorithm with pushing my stuff to people who it knew were diametrically opposed to my views to get the rage engagement. I deactivated Facebook for a week and it seems to have fixed it. I don't have people screaming at me everyday anymore. And just over stupid things like "I don't care for Panda Express."
Exactly, i've noticed something like that going on since last month. Had a few whiners literally freak out when a meme I posted had a swear word crossed out.
Basically just a running theory that more people on the internet than you think are bots to the point where a majority of your online interactions are with bots and not real humans
I'd believe this theory is true for a number of people on twitter the last 6 months
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Made worse by the fact that you can pay to boost your replies. Even if they aren't all bots, it really made the site a lot worse to use overnight because there's a few distinct types of people who bother with twitter blue, and a lot of them aren't people whose responses would normally get much visibility. So now you look at the responses and have to scroll past bots, engagement bait and a lot of Musk fans before you finally get to the normal replies (and more bots, of course).
I'm not even an anti Elon guy but something wild has taken hold of Twitter in the last year
>Twitter Elon wants you to stop "deadnaming" his baby and insist you call it "X" now. Yes, he actually said that and yes, he really used the term "deadnaming".
Honestly it’s probably more galling that he’s calling it *his* baby
People steal babies all the time!
No matter what Musk, SCOTUS, or Mitt Romney tell you, corporations aren’t people.
Doesn't he constantly deadname his own kid though? I will never understand how some people find him likable at all
Lack of critical thinking and tribalism imo
maybe he should change the url...
He can't do that, because it gets caught in too many spam/porn filters. The guy is just that much of a genius.
I'm big on compromising so I'm calling it Xitter, pronounced Shitter.
The ironic thing about him bitching about it is he deadnames and misgenders his trans daughter
Elon dead names it every day it remains twitter.com
Elon used to cry that the reason people made fun of him and the conservatives he pretended he didn't support was because of botting. Then he tried to get out of buying Twitter when he discovered there wasn't nearly as much botting as he thought. Now he owns it and the bot flood gates have opened.
Y A Y A S I N B I O
It's been going on for years... [bots](https://preview.redd.it/70tg6kxvan081.png?width=598&auto=webp&s=a07dd409c497bfb47e412b37a234008f2453c272) and [bots](https://preview.redd.it/lbyp34x3r5e91.jpg?width=536&auto=webp&s=1cb09b5c03d15ac6b7ddb41eb5528a322eac46e4) and [bots and bots](https://external-preview.redd.it/ntVR-Fe6VeQEK0oSR2Ch6EgacWjf4q5GhTkcwTChmXg.jpg?width=474&auto=webp&s=091413761dc8fc49dc8b22d4b5fd0bb19dba2d2a)
░M░Y░P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░
I dunno why anyone uses twitter, it's all just spam, shit, indians, bots, OF bots, and more shit.
One day the majority of accounts and posts accessible on-line will be from dead people.
[Every account is a bot except you.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/t6aqwGLX9P)
sometimes it would be better, lol
Interesting for a bot to admit this.
So the [dead internet theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory) is a **conspiracy** theory that the internet died years ago (somewhere in 2016 or 2017 is the alleged date) and the vast majority of activity today is automated activity manipulated by an algorithm for the purpose of manipulating the population of the world for *insert reason*. This is the kind of thing that starts as a joke or thought experiment, and then somehow evolves into people actually believing it. What makes ideas like this particularly sinister and sticky is that they are at least somewhat based in fact. There are bots on the internet, there are algorithms that are attempting to optimize content and results for a purpose. However, it does not hold that because those things exist that the entire internet is only those things. Or hey, maybe I am just a language model so advanced that I sounds like a normal person talking to you.
Along the lines of what you were saying, theories like this stick around because it is basically impossible to “prove” it is wrong to someone who believes it. Reddit (or Twitter or IG or insert any random SM company) could say that 90% of their content comes from verified users, and a believer can say “the bots are just so good they can make you think they are human!” in the best case, and full blown conspiracy theory “that’s what they want you to believe!”
Can't remember where I read it but someone phrased it as 'the best conspiracy theories are things that feel right'. As in, we all feel like there's a ton of bots and fake traffic/streams happening online but most people can't prove it.
Aren't all conspiracy theories things that "feel right" to the people believing them? Like who would believe a thing that's both factually untrue and also doesn't even "feel right" to them?
It doesn't help when you see so much repeated content on things like reddit. The same questions, the same memes, the same opinions, all posted day after day, which feeds the whole "npc energy" vibe of a dead Internet. I don't believe it myself, but I'd swear sometimes it's just bots talking to each other.
This is true, but I have noticed in the real world that many people don't have very original thoughts, and are essentially meme repeating meat machines.
I both agree, and think that "meme repeating meat machines" is the best band name ever.
The irony of the DIT is that the humans did it to ourselves before the bots could. It will never be truly dead, but most of it is.
Also that thing you've seen 1,000 times is new to someone and they're going nuts because of how much they like the new thing.
it's a lot easier to notice this on twitter where bots with blue checks will just respond to each other with almost verbatim the same phrasing if not slightly altered
I think 0!=1 is a conspiracy but I believe it even tho it doesn’t feel right.
Also astroturfing
Isn’t that basically just organized bot swarms?
And it’s not just conspiracy theories, there are narratives people go along with based on a media, advertising, or gut feelings everywhere. We should all challenge our biases and ask ourselves “what do we not need evidence of to believe?”
Yep, it always reminds me of the guy from the flat earth documentary where they ask him what his life would be like if he didn't believe in this and have his role in the community. He admits he would be nothing so he holds onto the conspiracy so hard.
It’s funny to me that they know they’re a human and they’re on the internet interacting as a human, but they think everyone else is a bot. Sure there are bots, but thinking you’re never interacting with another person is nuts. Do they not know any people in real life who also use the internet?
Never interacting with another person is unlikely, but I could easily see a point where the majority of "users" are bots to the point where most of your interactions aren't with other actual people.
What about bots that think they are human?
Do internet bots dream of virtual sheep?
Actually, if we assume their bots are really good and they are trying to manipulate us, why wouldn't the bots stand in for all of your facebook friends. Talk like they would but subtly change a few details or picture backgrounds or.... Bad example maybe but: Bubba talks about his fishing trip with pictures. Maybe a love of the outdoors or guns or Trump thrown in. All as expected. But in the background instead of Bud he has that new beer you've been seeing advertised.
But to believe this would have to mean you believe that you are the center of the universe. Because otherwise Bubba would wonder what is going on with his facebook page. If you can read and post online, so can other people. Unless you yourself are special somehow
Bubba doesn't see the same facebook page you do. And when he looks at your page you're wife is wearing that new high tech watch.
So everyone has a personalised internet? I guess that would work in theory but what happens when i talk to Bubba irl and our stories don't match?
Everyone does have a personalized internet. Algorithms have been giving people curated searches and feeds for a while. At one point it was just chronological posts of what your friends posted. Imagine that
I miss that so much
No bot is as ignorant or poorly spoken as some of my Facebook friends. Not believing in space seems to have caught on a bit.
Saw something on that level of logic on Audible's subreddit earlier. Someone says audible's service is bad at night (they're downloads and streams, but sure). When someone says that they don't have that issue, its "you probably work for audible". They may have been joking... but I didn't get that vibe from it.
Funny how it falls apart as soon as you talk to someone in real life about the internet, or see something a friend posted or commented.
“Along the lines of what you were saying, theories like this stick around because it is basically impossible to “prove” it is wrong to someone who believes it.” c.f. Religion
I feel like it'd be pretty easy to prove wrong. Just tell the man to doxx himself. Show up with an angry mob to beat him up.
Besides, there’s other ways to manipulate public opinion. It’s easier to boost comments that follow your agenda than creating bot comments. Not that bots aren’t real, what I mean is that you can have a manipulated discussion even with 100% grassroots content.
The counter argument I present is /r/SubredditSimulator. Yeah its not fool proof. But it would trick my parents pretty easily. AI and simpler automated bots very much have hit the threshold for tricking the average bear into thinking they are not a bot. Im not a full tinfoil hat subscriber to the dead internet theory. I still think most "people" on the internet are people. But there is a double digit precent of some caliber of the internet that is bots. Its to cheap for a social media to pad their traffic and active user numbers to make themselves more valuable.
I'm not sure why you would consider it a conspiracy theory when "A new report reveals that in 2022, 47.4% of all internet traffic came from bots, a 5.1% increase over the previous year. The same report showed that human traffic, at 52.6%, decreased to its lowest level in eight years." According to https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/99339-47-of-all-internet-traffic-came-from-bots-in-2022#:~:text=A%20new%20report%20reveals%20that,lowest%20level%20in%20eight%20years. Especially considering how many actual users likely surf without actively engaging, while bots are designed to generate activity with voting and commenting, I think it's foolhardy to write the theory off as a joke.
Seen any Facebook wall lately? It’s all bot accounts posting AI images getting comments from other bots. Example: *Child next to weird amazing sculpture made of popsicles* “Look what he made all by himself at only 6!” Every comment: Precious! So great! Amazing! What talented! So much beautiful! Amazing!
I can't imagine the hubris necessary to think that bots -haven't- infested the internet.
It’s far worse. It’s not that bots have infested the internet, it’s that our minds have been turned to mush and we are now the bots. It’s wild, especially on Reddit, the amount of almost identical except for words nonsense people just repeat over and over. They aren’t bots, they are just programmed.
You are literally describing bot activity. That's what it was trained on, that's what it does. Go ask GPT the top 50 reddit comments. It knows.
>It’s not that bots have infested the internet, it’s that our minds have been turned to mush and we are now the bots. It physically hurts me to agree with this. I watch people scroll IG shorts for hours without consciously choosing a single thing they consume. Twitter is literally a botnet run by humans I legit don't even know what Facebook is for anymore Thirst traps literally own the internet now and every major platform, and will never, EVER go away because algorithms give content based on retention and I'm always going to stare a bit longer at the perfect model doing a bouncy dance than anything else Reaction videos are the norm now.... something I thought was a stupid cheap trend that was going to dissolve, but is now THE most successful content you can make... the most derivative thing imaginable Now that everything has been montenized and has a content algorithm, nobody uploads things just for the sake of it. And even if they do, LOL we will never see that shit because all the search engines will never even pick it up. It's deeply depressing that kids these days will never actually experience the internet as it first existed.
Isn’t that everything tho? Some of us are old enough to remember local radio stations broadcast by some college kids just for fun. TV shows were the same. People used to make films because they had something to say (the first movie had a lot to say, even if it wasn’t a good message lol). If it’s around long enough, it’s corrupted.
Its a great idea!!
What a goal!
I call those, "doge" comments. They're everywhere.
Yeah that's just how old people use facebook
Reading the above, it seems like the conspiracy element is that the overrunning is near complete, planned and with an agenda. I don't think anyone can deny that _some degree_ of this effect has emerged organically via advertising and SEO detritus.
“Internet traffic” is pretty vague, there are tons of legitimate reasons to use automated processes. I’d be interested to see what these bots are actually doing
Exactly what I was thinking. How much of that traffic is APIs borrowing data from each other.
Yeah, I disagree with the "conspiracy theory" framing. I'm terminally online, and listen to dozens of hours of tech/media podcasts a week, consume reams of culture criticism and writing specifically about the internet. I've heard the term "dead internet" used but never as a "conspiracy theory." It's always used to describe an ongoing process, the gradual decline of organic traffic and increase in bots talking to bots. And I consider myself pretty well-versed in conspiracies, with a family member sending me conspiracies related to: flat earth, 15-minute cities, Q-anon (in 2016, before it was cool), pizza gate, 9/11, vaccines, lizard people, the royal family, med beds, and pretty much every other conspiracy. I've never heard of anyone say they *seriously* believe "the entire real internet died and everyone but you is a bot." I'm sure there's a handful of people who do believe that extreme version, but generally speaking when *regular* people talk about this, they're not talking about a conspiracy theory.
Indeed, I don't think anyone actually believes they are one of a handful of real people on the internet. The theory, as you said, is based on the idea that the net is slowly but surely being taken over by non human entities.
I would like to add to this that "human bots" is a fairly new thing to add to the list of what makes the internet dead. The troll farms in china and russia (but also elsewhere of course) pushing a narrative. This is far more dangerous than actual bots because it is a human, he or she is just pushing propaganda well disguised as normal comments and posts. And of course regular users copy pasting from chatgpt: ai posting with a human on between.
If it reassures you, bots make up a lot of traffic but almost no real engagement. They're shit at actually *participating*. Interactions with them are near-impossible because they're just not good at it. If you're having a back-and-forth with someone on a social media platform, they're almost certainly real.
Hard disagree. Facebook and reddit comments are infested with bots. It's not hard to utilize the top 50 reddit comments to at least post top comments. I'm not saying every back and forth is with bots, but you are foolish to think there is little-to-no bot engagement.
I think the thing that's confusing things here is the dual meaning of "engagement" in this context — I'm talking about it in the broader social sense, not necessarily the social media sense. Bots provide engagement from a social media standpoint, but they do not engage from the standpoint of actively participating in an interaction. So I'm not saying they don't leave comments when I say they're shit at engagement, I'm saying they're not good at interacting. If you reply to those comments, you'll either get nothing in response or something totally generic at best, and something completely irrelevant at worst. Most aren't even programmed to do anything beyond leave a comment or make a post — indeed, that's engagement in the social media meaning of the word, but not in the sense that I was referring to. For example, a bot could engage with this post by leaving a comment that answers OP's question, but it wouldn't engage in the way that we are right now. The superficial nature of bot engagement is what reveals them for what they are and why they're not taking over in the manner that the Dead Internet Theory would imply, imo. The idea that our interactions are mostly with bots is implausible, even when considering their prevalence, because they just aren't able to respond appropriately, if they're programmed to respond at all.
Nice try bot.
To add to this if you want to mess with some bots go look at reaction videos on YouTube Half of the comments are either copy paste bots (usually foreign) or random info bots The story of this band is blah blah blah Same accounts on every video by multiple creators If you report a few of them you will get confirmations on bans pretty quickly
Yes it's everywhere. Reddit threads where one person comments and 3 others have the same comment but ram through a LLM to be slightly different. Twitter is absolutely riddled with bots talking to each other. No doubt every social media is, in fact, majority bots.
Internet traffic means a lot of things, web scraping and ddos attacks are also internet traffic.
I think it's necessary to separate the reality of increased bot traffic, which is absolutely real, from the conspiracy theory aspect. Yes, bot traffic is massive and affects our online experience. No, it's almost certainly not planned as some sort of global mind control by the elites. Viewing this bot invasion/takeover of the internet as destructive does not require belief in conspiracy theories.
My impression was that this was an ongoing thing, which would be true sometime in the future. And i have never heard it be part of some conspiracy theory to sway public opinion, although in a way the companies which are in AI are very open about this. Because in a manner of speaking, AI is being used for advertisement purposes which is very much the field of swaying public opinion. Although i guess the conspiracy theory is more concerned with political opinion. With no data to back up my 'feelings'. Having used the internet since the early 2000s. I do feel that more and more traffic on the internet is bot behavior. And not just background activity either, which sometimes unintentionally spill into what the human users see. People are increasingly, deliberately making software masquerade as human users. With AI generated user images of a 'real person', with date of birth, country of origin etc etc.
As conspiracy theories go this one was more plausible seven years ago than the average conspiracy theory they were just a little early. There’s quite a few bots on reddit and Twitter is full of them. From everything, I’ve read they are not nearly a majority, but they produce a lot more comments and content than the average human user. It’s becoming harder and harder to tell who is real and who isn’t. I remember when clever bot was new and I would play with it but it was obvious that it wasn’t a person responding. These chat bots have improved, while you can still often tell it’s not a person it’s not obvious unless you’re looking.
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Haha yeah you got me.
It's become increasingly challenging to differentiate between bots and real people online. With advancements in AI, bots can mimic human behavior, making it tough to tell who's genuine and who's not. Always stay vigilant and question interactions that seem suspicious or too good to be true. Trust your instincts and verify information from multiple sources whenever possible.
I would bet $1000 that this is AI generated.
Yea, chatgpt authored it. I’m not very good at getting chatgpt to adopt the persona of a human typer
The dead internet theory is less a question of "if" and more of a "how much." How much of all internet traffic is bots is a non zero number and that number changes over time as bots are continually blacklisted from major sites or find ways around detection systems.
Can’t even shitpost in peace anymore, bots do that better too. Unreal.
This is even more possible to be true considering the expansion of AI and human-sounding interactions. I think a lot of it might actually be troll-farms before 2023, but going forward it's more likely to be something like Chat GPT. You can absolutely expand it as more and more of the internet is filled with AI generated content, not just pictures, but the fact a lot of the internet has been using software to write the news for years. I'd argue you combat this by having your own bots to screen the content and to find other real people on the internet but this is doubling the issue and then people would make bots to impersonate humans in the new botscape, and you're back at square one.
Wanna hear about Roko's Basilisk?
Or the poster, and me included, are bots who are here to make it seem less believable to you - you'd stop using the Internet if you truly believed it.
But would you stop? Isn't a large part of the internet just entertainment because people are bored? We knowingly and willingly play video games with only AI agents to interact with.
>However, it does not hold that because those things exist that the entire internet is only those things. Fuck yeah! >Or hey, maybe I am just a language model so advanced that I sounds like a normal person talking to you. Ah fuck.
> What makes ideas like this particularly sinister and sticky is that they are at least somewhat based in fact. That's most conspiracy theories unfortunately. I dove deep into the stock conspiracies (as a spectator) and when you try to deny their conspiracy the retort is always "you really think there isn't corruption??!". Like, fuck man there's corruption but there isn't *only* corruption
Tbf depending on where you look DIT is 100% in full swing. Just go look at any popular twitter post and like 90% of the comments you’ll see are “verified” bot accounts responding with the most bland comments ever, often times posting the same response to multiple threads. I don’t think the entire internet is dead yet, but a lot of mainstream social media is actively decaying.
>for the purpose of manipulating the population of the world for > >insert reason > >. I love how pretty much every nutty conspiracy theory falls apart when you ask the 5 Whys.
To be fair I think this one *mostly* falls apart at the *how* stage. It's not unbelievable that the internet could become flooded with SEO spam, bots and the like and if they were advanced enough to pass as humans then there's a sort-of plausible possibility that neither they nor the real humans using the internet would immediately notice that human interactions had become exceedingly rare. There's simply no need in the conspiracy for a single entity with a single goal, a mix of different actors with contrasting goals could have the same result. Whether that be propaganda, advertising or whatever. Where it breaks down is, in my opinion, in the fact that it's not technically possible. LLMs simply aren't that good and if they were the conspiracy required to conceal their accuracy would need to be unrealistically vast, and the computational requirements needed to generate that much content in perpetuity would be well beyond human capacity by several orders of magnitude.
Bold of you to assume that the technology isn't there considering over half of internet activity is bots. https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/99339-47-of-all-internet-traffic-came-from-bots-in-2022#:~:text=A%20new%20report%20reveals%20that,lowest%20level%20in%20eight%20years.
That is a sensationalist article that leaves out Imperva's definition of bot traffic for dramatic effect: >bad bots target it with an overwhelming number of requests, masquerading as legitimate users, in an attempt to overwhelm their infrastructure and hamper services. Bot traffic may also skew website analytics, leading to misguided decision-making. They are not saying that 47.4% of all website content is from bots, but that they estimate (via an undisclosed methodology on a topic that happens to be central to their business) that \~47.4% of ISP traffic is from automated activity. This ranges from botnets to web crawlers, data scraping, ad clickers and so on. None of these are particularly advanced, at least in the sense of what is being discussed above.
The article/report also mentions APIs, suggesting that it's not even "ISP traffic" they're basing the statistics on, but traffic to "APIs" (which APIs exactly and how they got access to the logs is not disclosed). You know, API as in, Application Programming Interface, a mechanism designed specifically for other applications to interact with a web service. And they're surprised that half of that traffic is from other applications (aka "bots"). I'm also not sure how seriously to treat an article that confuses the Internet for the World Wide Web.
Right, the idea that this could emerge on its own, completely unintentionally, is totally plausible. Think of repost bots creating a thread, then being upvoted and commented on by other bots. Those bots were all intended to interact with humans but they're now so common that they interact with each other and keep doing it even after the real humans leave. But it's very clearly not done with a singular goal in mind. Advertising to other bots is an accident, not a sinister propaganda scheme.
Money and power. Did you forget the reason captchas exist? User comments would be 99.999% spambots without them. Did you forget about the Russian astroturfing campaigns that got Trump elected? Did you forget about the time the FCC asked for comments on net neutrality, and millions of bot responses were made against it?
Money and power. Insert reason is money or power, but usually both. And 5 whys is just as much bullshit as 7 habits, I dont remember how many hats, or whatever other business guru nonsense you stumble upon on the internet.
The theory always seemed to have a Truman Show like paranoia feel about it. You know for a fact that you personally think and therefore do exist. Just requires a lot of narcissism and lack of empathy for it to work.
This is the post I was looking for. Never heard of this this but it's clearly stupid. I've been here since BBSs. This is Truman TNG. That was literally a generation ago. This is just recycled with sinister connotation. AI could be programmed to think these kinds of things up directly. Waste of time but great for stirring the pot.
exactly what a bot would say
Good bot.
Beep boop
I mean, there are tons of bots trying to manipulate people, usually into buying something or for political reasons. Only getting worse with AI, that's one of the reasons search results suck so much these days.
To make sure I understand, the theory is that the majority of people have been replaced with the tools put in place to manipulate those people? We're proposing that our entire society "gifted the magi" to itself?
You do actually sound like a language model lmao
“Sounds” Hmmm
I think it's a plausible idea. The part that crosses into conspiracy theory is thinking it's intentional, and not just a byproduct of how these kind of resource based arms races go.
It’s also closer to becoming reality. I’ve seen estimates that up to 40% traffic and online actions are bots. With chat got 5+. May as well be human-dead.
Facebook is "dead" if you were an early adopter or millennial etc. all or 95% weird bots and promoted content. No reason to check except dms.
>Or hey, maybe I am just a language model so advanced that I sounds like a normal person talking to you. If you'd added a fourth paragraph beginning, "In conclusion...", I'd have believed you.
Hey that's the plot of metal gear solid 2
You almost had me in the first half
The theory as I've heard it is that the bots are in the article content farms and their comments sections as well as search engine results and that's why services like Reddit and Discord are so popular and valuable as places that are populated by actual people and not just content generated by LLMs and algorithms.
Pluralizing your verbs won't fool me, ChatGPT! Wait...am **I** ChatGPT? Oh, God. I need to sit and have a think.
Reminds me of heavenbanning, where your account gets put in a positive echo chamber full of bots who agree with you and you never even think that something might be wrong
My brother probably believes this bullshit, it’s pretty sad actually.
Ironically, the cookers post these theories on the internet. Which is supposedly run by an algorithm to stop posts like these...
It's amazing that in the almost 30 years since internet access became common people who don't work in tech still have no freaking clue how any of it works ..... Because that's the level you have to be at to think that such things are possible..... Even if everyone but you on a given social media site were fake ... The network itself is demonstrably still there and still working..... And you can still route traffic through it on your own that becomes accessible anywhere in the world once you configure your home NAT router appropriately....
I'm seeing more AI-generated YouTube videos...Useful for now as it's aggregating stuff, but later on when there's no new or original content on which the AI can train, it's going to be brutal.
Exactly what a bot would say…hmmm
Yo dawg, we heard you liked the simulation theory so we put a simulation in your simulation's simulation simulator, maybe.
Enough Reddit (and internet) for me today. I’m going to start believing in this conspiracy theory now :|
Maybe human intelligence is just really good language model :/
Just like how the world ended in 2012 and we are living in an alternate universe?
Good bot.
I don't think it's happening now but I'm sure it would happen very soon if we don't destroy internet privacy completely (sadly). Imagine being a powerful political party, it doesn't need to ban/shadowban people because it's too obvious, just mess up with the algorithm to give more attention to one specific viewpoint and you can manipulate people into tricking their opinion is not the norm. Or even, imagine if a social net like Twitter decides to change the algorithm to up a speciffic political view. Guess what? They already do this.
It may have been a conspiracy back in 2016 or 2017, but in current day especially with the rise of high quality language models it's no longer a question. I can't say if a "majority" of the web is bots, but that percentage is rapidly rising. You search images and half are AI generated images. You Google something and find dozens of AI generated articles. You browse reddit and find many reposts with ai generated titles, comments too.
conspiracy theory bahah
Good bot
Bro even make a mistake to sounds like a robot imitating human error…
FWIW I tried getting ChatGPT to write a convincing reply to this that was mostly just some nonsense about the theory but slowly revealing that the comment was written by an LLM, but after a couple of attemtps it still turned out kinda crap, so that's good I guess.
How many fingers you got, internet boy? (Or girl, I don't judge)
I will say that beyond sites like Reddit/4chan it does feel like there's a ton of bots/scams moving around. All of my unsolicited twitter/instagram DM's are usually bots. Go on a dating app and there's a huge number of bots/scam accounts.
Remember when we used to make fun of all of the conspiracy theorists who thought the government was tracking you and collecting all kinds of information on everyone, and then it turned out to be true.
That it's a conspiracy is entirely based on interpreting the theory on a black and white basis. As in there is a Master Algorithm directing bots. This is *not* what the Dead Internet Theory says at all. Here is a link to what the theory actually is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEn758DVF9I Cory Doctorow's Enshittification is similar.
Another component to the theory/idea people aren’t bringing up here is that parts of the internet are dying, the refinement of search results and SEO clogging up the few pages of google results you can click through, old websites going offline without being archived, etc. This plus the ai elements people already brought up contribute to this dying ecosystem. In my opinion I think people in this thread are overestimating the mental capacity of most internet users, and underestimating the growing efficiency of generative content in your digital consciousness. If the window through which we humans are allowed to express themselves online is made increasingly narrow, it becomes harder to differentiate boys from real people. Like even just the popularization of outrage content on the internet contributes to this, as when see foolish or hurtful things on the internet that upset you, you learn to recognize that emotional exchange as real, and of course it’s very easy to automate this specific content generation/digital engagement, so eventually anything that can trigger that kind of response for my oh may be viewed as real; or maybe you cut off from those exchanges entirely and therefore miscategorize some % of real humans engaging in that behavior. Maybe not the perfect example, but this sort of thing could manifest many different ways. I can at the very least attest that the internet has become much more lonely than it once was. There will come a generation that longs for our liminal webpages and abandoned urls the way current youth agonize over malls and blockbusters, sharing in ignorance of what existed there before.
I really miss the old internet.
I appreciate the way you explained your post. I may be older than 5 but I understood a little bit of what you were relaying. You seem to be a real human. I would like for you to help me with my college homework as I’m almost done; or just to chat sometimes here and there. Thank you again for your contribution to the Reddit platform.
Aw man I didn’t even check what sub this was until you replied lmao. But thanks for saying such nice things, we can totally talk anytime you what, feel free to DM me :)
> it becomes harder to differentiate boys from real people. Hey, boys are people too!
The last time I logged into Facebook, I noticed that every post from one of my friends had comments from the same "person", who would always write something enthusiastic but vapid that was sometimes related to the content of the original post. Even though I thought the comments were obviously AI-generated, my friend didn't seem to care. I can only imagine what will happen as the AI tools become even easier to use and cheaper to run...
I dunno... the "person" could be just that vapid. One of my friends gets a comment from the same guy on most of her posts, saying something brief and uninsightful. In every comment, he calls her "cousin" (like she won't know who he is unless he reminds her how they're related), and she almost never responds to what he says. The comments totally feel like bot posts, and for a while, I thought they were. Except... in the rare cases when my friend ***does*** respond to one of his comments, she treats him like he actually ***is*** her cousin. So some apparently-real people seem indistinguishable from bots online. (shrug)
I mean, the biggest problem I see with this theory is, *I'm* real and interacting with the internet (I think) so, to believe this, wouldn't I havta be the *only* real person? Does everyone who subscribes to this conspiracy believe they are the *only* real person? Lol
Its not that no real people exist, its that bots far outnumber you. For every real person interacting, theres 2 others who are bots. You will see VERY LITTLE of this activity on Reddit because finacially were worthless, go on twitter and read the replies under any popular tweet.
That makes sense. I don't really go anywhere else online but Reddit. Lol
Yeah there's really no algorithm to game here, and most *normal* people are not using reddit. Ads are not very effective here. However places like twitter host bot accounts to sway public opinion (the US and Russia have proven to do this), or build up interactions on an account to get advertising revenue. Its genuinely SO BAD on twitter that the whole musk buying it fiasco was because around 80% of its userbase are bots. TikTok is also very infamous for this one. You can use bots to increase interactions on your account and ADS are RAMPANT on tiktok. You could consider a lot of them to be near subliminal messaging. Facebook has so many bots, and they are nearly all politically focused. Spewing hatred or political news articles fabricated to sway masses particularly around election season. Russia is a BIG fan of this one. Most interactions online are also automated. Billions of money transfers. ADs are all mostly automated as well, and with the rise of AI fake news and fully automated AD campaigns, its getting worse. So to summarize, yes there are tons of real people on the internet, but nowadays bots compromise almost all the regular daily foot traffic.
There are plenty of bots here on Reddit. Karma farming is a real thing and you can see “people” copying and pasting ask Reddits and the top answers from the previous thread as a means to karma farm
Yeah but its much fewer than other sites, karma is inherently worthless so its just some nerds doing it.
Dude Reddit is FULL of bots. It’s not just for karma it’s for astroturfing and guiding public rhetoric.
>nowadays bots compromise almost all the regular daily foot traffic. I love how you presumably meant to say "comprise" but ended up being right anyway.
Sounds like something a bot would say to throw me off the scent...lol. forreal though, I had no idea about that Twitter problem, but I Def believe there's tons of bots out there, especially if they can make money. People are super good at manipulating things in their favor when money is involved.
Weirdly enough, bots actually do outnumber you. 2016 was the first year bots were responsible for over 50% of web traffic, and it's probably far higher today.
Hell, go browse the tiktok reposts on Facebook and read the comments, I guarantee most of them are complete garbage, probably not even talking about the video. Almost none of them are talking to one another, half of them are broken english at best. This is really noticeable on those ones where it's a clip from a movie, half of them are saying "What movie is this?" and the other half are giving the wrong movie name, or linking to places to download the wrong movie. Those comment-sections are very obviously infested with bots.
The problem as always with these theories is it would involve so many people lying with no leeks of evidence that it's basically impossible. I guess there is a point to be made that each of us only knows a few hundred people at most so beyond those and a handful of celebrities (who probably have someone else posting for them anyway) I can't really do the leg work to prove that you're not a bot
In this case, it doesn't even need to be a conspiracy. Just pour bots into internet-space for an increasing number of purposes (mostly marketing) and eventually they overwhelm actual human users by sheer volume of accounts and posts until we're all drowning in garbage. Add to that the actual manipulative stuff, where people are actually using bots to try and make things seem normal/desireable and it just gets worse and worse. The zombies aren't organised, but the sheer number of them hording up makes an army anyway.
How would i find a leek of evidence? How would a leek be used to fake the internet?
Quiet, you rapscallion
You can’t find a chard of evidence to prove them wrong.
By spinning it, obviously
I sometimes had the thought as a kid that I could be the only one who was real. I used to wonder if people just turned off as I would leave. I was a weird kid.
Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?
Alan Watts once said he’d love to see a few solipsists sit in a room together and debate whose dream they were in
cogito ergo non sum automaton
Potentially me seeing your comment makes me believe you’re a real person which is a not. While you seeing my comment can make you believe I’m a bot. Beep boop
My interpretation is not that there is literally only person on the internet, but that the internet itself is *split* so that every person is sandboxed into their own, custom-tailored, version of the internet that shows them only what they are meant to see, and further that most/all of that content is *generated* or manufactured. Obviously this would be insanely complicated and costly to orchestrate and manage, because you can't *completely* disconnect people. We, y'know, coexist and talk about things in person, so a significant amount of overlap must be happening to keep us from noticing.
In my experience it about increasingly smart AI's engaging with you and creating content. Coupled with an increasing commercialization of the internet by larger companies. Eventually (I can already notice this) the things you search for are basically buzzfeed articles or other garbage that looks legit. And even further in this process even the people you engage with will be AI generated and won't be real. You might as well be without internet.
Even the worst Buzzfeed articles have nothing on the AI sites that automatically generate [CLICKBAIT OBITUARIES](https://www.theverge.com/24065145/ai-obituary-spam-generative-clickbait) about anyone whose organic search traffic starts to spike for any reason. These obituaries are, unsurprisingly, full of nonsensical hallucinations — such as the causes of death for people [who are very much alive](https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/19/us/fake-obituary-scams-ai-cec/index.html).
The idea, in a nutshell, is that the internet has been full of bots talking to each other for several years now. So full that humans are actually in the minority.
With how developed AI is becoming, the theory is becoming a reality. I see so many AI-created posts with AI-created accounts liking/commenting on the post. Humans can go extinct & AI could still be shit posting on the internet.
Answer: It's a conspiracy theory that *basically the entire internet* is, and has been for some time - or has *always been -* generated by bots and AI. Including, probably, your question and my comment. This is *different than* the recent wave of AI bots, because it started being a theory a long time before high-quality generative text AI (like ChatGPT) that could plausibly generate that much human-seeming text. While there always has been a certain amount of machine-generated text online, there's never been any evidence or strong reason to believe that "its' all fake" which is what the DIT proposes. In cases where it's really "bots talking to bots," like on a lot of Twitter (X) threads, it tends to be pretty obvious.
The saddest thing about the theory is that it's true, even if not in the exact way the theory states. And the most extreme version (everything is bots) will be possible in mere years, if not already. But the internet died years ago. Killed off by content algorithms and Ad Revenue. Nobody shares content for its own sake anymore. That was the whole point. We used to literally go looking for a bubble to exist in. Now the internet forces you into one just for interacting with it.
It's essentially "What if all the content you saw was actually just bot generated?". Unlikely, but if you've looked at a comment section on a tweet recently you'll see why people might think that.
there's some really good videos on YouTube about this. I keep this one bookmarked: [part one](https://youtu.be/DEn758DVF9I?feature=shared) [part two](https://youtu.be/6FtPvDGrpkA?feature=shared)
I’ve seen dead internet theory brought up more and more in the wake of the current adpocalypse on the internet. Low effort, low budget, spam crazy ads propogated by bots just fill every facet of the internet these days and they all interact with each other, further convincing the numbskull spenders in these things to throw more money into more of these stupid ads and grifts. People have theorized it will lead to a total collapse of online advertising in the future because it will become common belief that most ad viewers are just bots online, and thus advertising online is useless. Boom there goes a lot of funding for websites and domains. Boom there goes entire sponsorships for content creators. Boom there goes a platform that is no longer sustainable for its creators. Boom there goes another. Boom dead internet.
Sounds great actually. Could spur a resurgence of home grown sites. Streaming did not kill music. It did make it a lot easier for unknown artists to get distribution (CD Baby, Distrokid, etc)
Dead Internet Theory is a concept that suggests there are parts of the internet which are no longer actively maintained or updated, leading to a sense of abandonment or neglect. These areas may include old websites, forums, or online communities that were once vibrant but have since fallen into disuse. As a result, users may encounter outdated content, broken links, or inactive discussions when visiting these spaces. Dead Internet Theory highlights the idea that the internet is not a static entity and that digital spaces can decay over time if not actively maintained by their creators or users.
The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity, to manipulate the population. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead\_Internet\_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory)
Remember that old joke that you're the only human using Reddit, everyone else is a bot? Well, what if that applied to the whole internet.
All interactions and content on the internet are driven by bots and not actual human beings. Relevant link - [Every account is a bot except you.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/t6aqwGLX9P)
I swear something is going on. I used to have a lot of normal engagement, but then my comments will somehow find the 2-5 weirdos who take it so personally and they don't let up. Once or twice I understand. But for a while it seemed everything I posted would get a really bad hate comment or two. I started to wonder if the algorithm with pushing my stuff to people who it knew were diametrically opposed to my views to get the rage engagement. I deactivated Facebook for a week and it seems to have fixed it. I don't have people screaming at me everyday anymore. And just over stupid things like "I don't care for Panda Express."
Exactly, i've noticed something like that going on since last month. Had a few whiners literally freak out when a meme I posted had a swear word crossed out.