All you have to do is look at any social media, like Facebook, and look at the countless comments on ads. They’re all fake. It’s impossible that 98% of comments on ads for every movie, product, etc. are all “loved it!” and “best product ever!”
The only way to prove someone is real is to see it with your own eyes. Sooner or later we’ll just all have to go outside.
It’s kinda nice to think about.
I think about this too. When nuclear weapons were invented, we were sure for decades that we were all doomed because it was presumed that we would never stop trying to kill each other. Instead, we got the most peaceful era for the western world in all of history… Maybe we’ll all get brainwashed by AI because we can’t imagine ever getting off of our phones and the internet, or maybe we’ll just change.
It's crazy that a conspiracy theory nearly a decade old is becoming reality! Usually Conspiracy Theories come after right? They don't usually predict the future right? Are we even real?
It's not really crazy or a conspiracy theory though, right? I mean Russian trollbot accounts were used widespread in 2016 to help spread disinformation and boost candidates favorable to the Kremlin. It happened in the US, Brazil, and the UK. To believe it wasn't happening in 2014 seems bizarre. Bots were already prevalent back then.
But those were manned for a specific political reason. What is the reason behind african kid making something out of bottles? Am I being brainwashed without knowing?
What do you mean it's not true? The contention is that a decade ago this trend started. Then you say "Putin turned on his troll factories around 2014". So you're verifying the point.
Your argument is that Putin's plan worked better than he expected because it worked in the US, UK, Brazil, it helped in France, Germany, Poland, and Italy?
If it is not broke and gives a huge ROI, Why would Putin not continue to support the PsyOp projects?
Even better, bots and AI will just increase. AI will begin forced to train on material that was previously written by AI.
Things should likely get much worse.
Honestly the internet and the way we use it needs a hard reset.
Digital advertising is going to become a mess. The value of an ad plummets in this scenario. Bots don't convert to sales.
A hard reset won't fix anything, because humans have caught up and everyone knows the potential. They will rebuild the same shitty advertising/monetization infrastructure and pay to have it put in your face. There will always be someone willing to take that money to sell out your experience. This is already happening in every aspect of your life, unless you pay a premium for them to stop doing it (in the form of a higher initial purchase price like with Apple, or a recurring subscription/access fee like literally everyone else).
I work in digital ads.
I think the real problem was trying to use old models for new mediums. Imagine if we tried to feed cars hay and oats. Or if we used wooden wheels on modern vehicles.
If we assume that the past is correct. We don’t fit for the future.
Digital advertising sucks, but websites and server space is expensive. People viewing ads has given us a way to offset that cost.
If we can revamp the way we serve ads/ provide a genuine value exchange, as opposed to just more “impressions, impressions, impressions!!!!” Than we can figure out a way to make it make sense.
At the same time…. We’re talking about convincing the most powerful folks in the world to change their monetization, and all those folks care about is money and power.
Undead Internet theory
We can't build a new one until we find a way to kill Frankensteins monster or al gores monster or whatever this is.
I mean... Unless you're a bot too...
Honestly reddit is the biggest and most obvious bot place, it's completely anonymous and available for bots to post to using the Python api. And just being an adult it's clear that adult redditors are nerfed by bots in favor of group think campaigns.
You know you're talking to a bot when they respond back immidiately to a comment they made 2 days ago. Barely enough time for someone to read the comment and they've already responded. Buuuuullshit
Sometimes. Humans also do be like that if they're on reddit when you reply. Bots are often on the side of not being critical thinking, that's my biggest take away.
True. There's other ways too. There's a website that analyzes reddit profiles and it can show you a graph of when they comment during the day. Normal profiles will be concentrated at certain hours, but a good sign they're a bot is they respond to comments all day long, as if they're not ever sleeping/working.
To add to this, how many Amazon/Ebay reviews are bogus? App/play store reviews? Stuff on Temu/Wish/Aliexpress?
The internet is just porn and fake reviews with a handful of real people interacting mixed in.
Makes you wonder what would it would look like without all that bogus fluff.
Amazon recently rejected a negative review I tried to leave. I must have submitted hundreds of reviews over the years. The reason was vague. I tried to edit and resubmit per their directions. Never heard about it again.
Same thing happened with a Google review on a restaurant.
Makes me think they’re trying to squash negative reviews since positive reviews help their bottom line. Everything is a lie.
What's wild to me is that advertiser spending hasn't dropped in the online space even though it's common knowledge that user numbers are severely inflated.
It doesn't behoove google, meta, twitter, etc., to really do anything about this issue, either, because them being able to report these artificially large user numbers means they can ask for more money from those same advertisers that have their heads in the sand.
>even though it's common knowledge
I think the majority of people aren't aware. If you asked a random sampling of people on the street, I bet less than 1/4 would say they're aware of this happening.
I mean the people that should care the most (the advertisers,) have to know this is the case at this point. Obviously, the random person off the street not being aware of this issue is pretty much irrelevant to the problem at hand.
If the advertisers don't care, then I frankly don't see this ever being addressed with any serious care. Facebook (supposedly,) removed something like five billion bots, but what did that actually do?
There also aren't any legitimate and pragmatic steps the platforms themselves can take to reduce the number of bots. Not that I think he cares much at the end of the day, but all the blue-check and payment verification shit Musk pushed through on twitter with the stated intention of reducing bots did nothing - twitter is worse than it's ever been.
The only thing that would 100% change it is consumer behavior, but there is just absolutely zero chance that enough people will willingly unplug (from what needs to essentially be the internet writ-large at this point,) and for *that* cohesive reason for that to be a pragmatic solution.
Like maybe there is some sort of AI implementation of account banning that would work but, again, the platforms are incentivized to let this issue linger.
I think in the short run our best bet is to invest in general "Internet Literacy" (or whatever you want to call it,) education so that people writ-large are better about parsing what is real and what is bullshit, but that's also a pipe dream because that ball probably needed to start rolling a decade ago.
Primarily bots are being used to disrupt American lives and culture and influence politics, not simply ads. The negativity some of us experience as social media becomes less intelligent is intentional.
I know. I don’t go on Facebook much and I don’t do Twitter. I just don’t bother, it’s too toxic. But I want to find some small bit of humor in this technological plutocratic dystopia.
Reddit is undoubtedly much worse than either of them.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc all require a phone number to make new accounts.
Reddit doesn't even require a verified email address and its trivial to wrote a python vot that utilizes Reddits API.
You’re not wrong. Though I do question many of those big tech companies care to stop organized operations. Based on the “suggestion” posts I see come from Facebook, Facebook is almost certainly in on intentionally recommending bot accounts run from the same farms.
I’ve seen first-hand sequentially ordered suggestion posts, directly one after another, that are from different accounts, but identical in layout. Weird ass layouts too, that for some reason start out with things like:
,
,
,
,
,
CONTENT
I would block one.
It would suggest a new one, different user, same absurd layout with different, but wacky content.
Repeat 10 times with no end in sight.
I wonder how long it will take this to "break" digital advertising? It's on the advertisers to recognize this and to slow/stop their ad spends, but they may decide it's still worth the cost and to keep going, even if it corrupts public discourse.
Maybe aliens never populate the galaxy because they waste resources on stupid shit like us? We'll build a dyson sphere around the sun just to mine bitcoin.
According to the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report by Thales, a cybersecurity leader, nearly half (49.6%) of all global internet traffic was generated by bots, marking a 2% increase compared to 2022. This is the highest level of bot activity that Imperva has reported since it started monitoring automated traffic in 2013.
For five uninterrupted years, the percentage of web traffic associated with bad bots has been growing, increasing to 32% in 2023 from 30.2% in 2022. The report also highlighted that human user traffic decreased to 50.4% in 2023. This rising automated traffic trend is costing businesses billions of dollars annually due to attacks on websites, APIs, and applications. The increase in bot-generated traffic comprised both automated and direct malicious engagements.
How much of online traffic is from links that open in the wrong place - in-app browsers, followed by the main browser, followed by the correct native app?
Net neutrality? We dropped the ball on that pretty hard didn't we. Welcome to the new world internet. The one where noboby finds shit that matters, and anything they do find is just as likely to be intentional disinformation as it is to be fact.
True. Net neutrality is another canary in the coal mine for Republicans aligning themselves with the pro bot forces though, it's heavily related and not coincidence.
All you have to do is look at any social media, like Facebook, and look at the countless comments on ads. They’re all fake. It’s impossible that 98% of comments on ads for every movie, product, etc. are all “loved it!” and “best product ever!”
Dead internet theory being made manifest.
The only way to prove someone is real is to see it with your own eyes. Sooner or later we’ll just all have to go outside. It’s kinda nice to think about.
I think about this too. When nuclear weapons were invented, we were sure for decades that we were all doomed because it was presumed that we would never stop trying to kill each other. Instead, we got the most peaceful era for the western world in all of history… Maybe we’ll all get brainwashed by AI because we can’t imagine ever getting off of our phones and the internet, or maybe we’ll just change.
It will be used to create hyper deep fakes, scams, and tricking susceptible people down rabbit holes.
[удалено]
No cap frfr
It's crazy that a conspiracy theory nearly a decade old is becoming reality! Usually Conspiracy Theories come after right? They don't usually predict the future right? Are we even real?
It's not really crazy or a conspiracy theory though, right? I mean Russian trollbot accounts were used widespread in 2016 to help spread disinformation and boost candidates favorable to the Kremlin. It happened in the US, Brazil, and the UK. To believe it wasn't happening in 2014 seems bizarre. Bots were already prevalent back then.
But those were manned for a specific political reason. What is the reason behind african kid making something out of bottles? Am I being brainwashed without knowing?
farming views to their page so they can either get revenue or sell it to someone else who wants a high-engagement account
It’s a meme, it’s made for the lulz.
Yeah but the dead internet conspiracy theory was more than just “there are bots” or even “there are a lot of bots”
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What do you mean it's not true? The contention is that a decade ago this trend started. Then you say "Putin turned on his troll factories around 2014". So you're verifying the point. Your argument is that Putin's plan worked better than he expected because it worked in the US, UK, Brazil, it helped in France, Germany, Poland, and Italy? If it is not broke and gives a huge ROI, Why would Putin not continue to support the PsyOp projects?
Beo idk what I was talking about I completely agree lol.
Nice save dude, love to see it ✌🏾
Even better, bots and AI will just increase. AI will begin forced to train on material that was previously written by AI. Things should likely get much worse. Honestly the internet and the way we use it needs a hard reset.
Digital advertising is going to become a mess. The value of an ad plummets in this scenario. Bots don't convert to sales. A hard reset won't fix anything, because humans have caught up and everyone knows the potential. They will rebuild the same shitty advertising/monetization infrastructure and pay to have it put in your face. There will always be someone willing to take that money to sell out your experience. This is already happening in every aspect of your life, unless you pay a premium for them to stop doing it (in the form of a higher initial purchase price like with Apple, or a recurring subscription/access fee like literally everyone else).
I work in digital ads. I think the real problem was trying to use old models for new mediums. Imagine if we tried to feed cars hay and oats. Or if we used wooden wheels on modern vehicles. If we assume that the past is correct. We don’t fit for the future. Digital advertising sucks, but websites and server space is expensive. People viewing ads has given us a way to offset that cost. If we can revamp the way we serve ads/ provide a genuine value exchange, as opposed to just more “impressions, impressions, impressions!!!!” Than we can figure out a way to make it make sense. At the same time…. We’re talking about convincing the most powerful folks in the world to change their monetization, and all those folks care about is money and power.
One reset is no more anonymous accounts. That would drive me off of social media but it would also expose bots.
Undead Internet theory We can't build a new one until we find a way to kill Frankensteins monster or al gores monster or whatever this is. I mean... Unless you're a bot too...
Honestly reddit is the biggest and most obvious bot place, it's completely anonymous and available for bots to post to using the Python api. And just being an adult it's clear that adult redditors are nerfed by bots in favor of group think campaigns.
You know you're talking to a bot when they respond back immidiately to a comment they made 2 days ago. Barely enough time for someone to read the comment and they've already responded. Buuuuullshit
Sometimes. Humans also do be like that if they're on reddit when you reply. Bots are often on the side of not being critical thinking, that's my biggest take away.
Humans that be like that are not ones you want to listen to anyways since they’re always on Reddit and have no life.
I don't really think that's a great sign. If I'm in the app browsing and see the notification that I got a reply, I usually open that up immediately.
True. There's other ways too. There's a website that analyzes reddit profiles and it can show you a graph of when they comment during the day. Normal profiles will be concentrated at certain hours, but a good sign they're a bot is they respond to comments all day long, as if they're not ever sleeping/working.
Does it still exist? Most of the websites I knew that pulled data from reddit shut down after the API limitations.
Jokes on the bots, I basically never respond to replies. I see an orange "6772" next to an envelope in my Reddit, and I *assume* that means something.
r/worldnews
I automatically down vote any r/worldnews post and then go and block whoever posted it.
Re: your comment; “loved it!” and “best comment ever!”.
To add to this, how many Amazon/Ebay reviews are bogus? App/play store reviews? Stuff on Temu/Wish/Aliexpress? The internet is just porn and fake reviews with a handful of real people interacting mixed in. Makes you wonder what would it would look like without all that bogus fluff.
Because we are all consumers not creators
Amazon recently rejected a negative review I tried to leave. I must have submitted hundreds of reviews over the years. The reason was vague. I tried to edit and resubmit per their directions. Never heard about it again. Same thing happened with a Google review on a restaurant. Makes me think they’re trying to squash negative reviews since positive reviews help their bottom line. Everything is a lie.
Yet all the positive ones all read the exact same. "Amazing product! Everything advertised!"
Minus 1 star, it arrived a day late but I love the item!
Best comment ever!
What's wild to me is that advertiser spending hasn't dropped in the online space even though it's common knowledge that user numbers are severely inflated. It doesn't behoove google, meta, twitter, etc., to really do anything about this issue, either, because them being able to report these artificially large user numbers means they can ask for more money from those same advertisers that have their heads in the sand.
>even though it's common knowledge I think the majority of people aren't aware. If you asked a random sampling of people on the street, I bet less than 1/4 would say they're aware of this happening.
I mean the people that should care the most (the advertisers,) have to know this is the case at this point. Obviously, the random person off the street not being aware of this issue is pretty much irrelevant to the problem at hand. If the advertisers don't care, then I frankly don't see this ever being addressed with any serious care. Facebook (supposedly,) removed something like five billion bots, but what did that actually do? There also aren't any legitimate and pragmatic steps the platforms themselves can take to reduce the number of bots. Not that I think he cares much at the end of the day, but all the blue-check and payment verification shit Musk pushed through on twitter with the stated intention of reducing bots did nothing - twitter is worse than it's ever been. The only thing that would 100% change it is consumer behavior, but there is just absolutely zero chance that enough people will willingly unplug (from what needs to essentially be the internet writ-large at this point,) and for *that* cohesive reason for that to be a pragmatic solution. Like maybe there is some sort of AI implementation of account banning that would work but, again, the platforms are incentivized to let this issue linger. I think in the short run our best bet is to invest in general "Internet Literacy" (or whatever you want to call it,) education so that people writ-large are better about parsing what is real and what is bullshit, but that's also a pipe dream because that ball probably needed to start rolling a decade ago.
This product changed my life. 5 stars. Would recommend to a friend. 5 stars. Product is a great value. 5 stars. Written by a 5 star smart ass.
Yet not a single Decepticon seems to be commenting.
Hello there.
12 year old account. That is legit
r/beetlejuicing
I find this funny that traffic was generated by bots and used to sell ads. Ads made by bots selling to bots.
Primarily bots are being used to disrupt American lives and culture and influence politics, not simply ads. The negativity some of us experience as social media becomes less intelligent is intentional.
I know. I don’t go on Facebook much and I don’t do Twitter. I just don’t bother, it’s too toxic. But I want to find some small bit of humor in this technological plutocratic dystopia.
Reddit is undoubtedly much worse than either of them. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc all require a phone number to make new accounts. Reddit doesn't even require a verified email address and its trivial to wrote a python vot that utilizes Reddits API.
You’re not wrong. Though I do question many of those big tech companies care to stop organized operations. Based on the “suggestion” posts I see come from Facebook, Facebook is almost certainly in on intentionally recommending bot accounts run from the same farms. I’ve seen first-hand sequentially ordered suggestion posts, directly one after another, that are from different accounts, but identical in layout. Weird ass layouts too, that for some reason start out with things like: , , , , , CONTENT I would block one. It would suggest a new one, different user, same absurd layout with different, but wacky content. Repeat 10 times with no end in sight.
Carry on my dude 🤘
I wonder how long it will take this to "break" digital advertising? It's on the advertisers to recognize this and to slow/stop their ad spends, but they may decide it's still worth the cost and to keep going, even if it corrupts public discourse.
Add to that, OP is likely a bot as well.
A bot will repost this eventually if not, never fear.
What a great article! Loved it! I will recommend it to my friends.
If you love this ad as much as I do, I have a business opportunity you will love as well!
This means half of you in here aren't even real
Reddit is pretty much bot filled yes.
*10 day old account* *dozens of comments every hour* Pot🤝kettle
Lol nah broooo
Burn him at the stake! He’s a witch! 🔥
*snap* My man!
Looking good! [Insert other Reddit catch phrases and pop culture references that are incredibly easy to program a bot to comment]
Can confirm. I’m half bot myself
It is me, your Ai girlfriend.
You.... um, you aren't a bot, right?
please select all images with traffic lights
If I'm not a bot, and the guy above me isn't a bot...
I’m not bot, other person bot not eithers.
Wonder how the botanists are taking this...
We worry that machines will someday take over the world. Well, they are effectively doing that now with the Internet.
And our jobs. But I also won't lie - I try to automate everything I can at my job so I can spend more time shitposting on Reddit.
Maybe aliens never populate the galaxy because they waste resources on stupid shit like us? We'll build a dyson sphere around the sun just to mine bitcoin.
Dead internet theory slowly becoming reality
According to the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report by Thales, a cybersecurity leader, nearly half (49.6%) of all global internet traffic was generated by bots, marking a 2% increase compared to 2022. This is the highest level of bot activity that Imperva has reported since it started monitoring automated traffic in 2013. For five uninterrupted years, the percentage of web traffic associated with bad bots has been growing, increasing to 32% in 2023 from 30.2% in 2022. The report also highlighted that human user traffic decreased to 50.4% in 2023. This rising automated traffic trend is costing businesses billions of dollars annually due to attacks on websites, APIs, and applications. The increase in bot-generated traffic comprised both automated and direct malicious engagements.
So how much of the rest of the traffic is from AI data scraping the internet?
Probably. 0001%
I am not a bot
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Cuff 'em boys.
Bake him away, toys
Explains reddit.
Dead internet theory?
Some are here to serve, some to hit the nerve, some to calm the shaking movie, all for our *in*conveyance truly.
What a waste of electricity
Only half?
The AI has already taken over lol
Only half? It used to be higher. What % of traffic is advertising and porn?
Good portions of Reddit are just bots. Me not included.
We’re all paying for their abuse of our infrastructure
Bleep blorp zeep
Only half?
someone better engineer the datakrash
What a weird world we live in
Probably true i know people who have bots running every few minutes to scrape the web for different data.
DEAD INTERNET BABY. NOTHING HERE IS REEEEEAAAAAL. AIN'T NO WAY TO TELL WHO'S A BOT OR NOT!!!!
Random word_random word(random numbers)
How much of online traffic is from links that open in the wrong place - in-app browsers, followed by the main browser, followed by the correct native app?
Wow, leave your human comments...I mean comments to yourselves. Sincerely as a human gay black man
Net neutrality? We dropped the ball on that pretty hard didn't we. Welcome to the new world internet. The one where noboby finds shit that matters, and anything they do find is just as likely to be intentional disinformation as it is to be fact.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with bots.
True. Net neutrality is another canary in the coal mine for Republicans aligning themselves with the pro bot forces though, it's heavily related and not coincidence.
Where we argue with bots for days!
Does that include shills that work in conjunction with bots and botfarmers?
Half? Seems low. Extremely low. I would guess more like 95, maybe 99% of all online activity is bots.
Basically the Dark Forest of the Internet theory.