The Dead Internet Theory

[Skullzrawk9]

Recently, I’ve heard about this theory that the internet is essentially ‘dead’. According to this theory, the internet now consists of more bot activity than activity from real people. Most large social media platforms and websites largely consist of bots interacting with other bots. 

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t people on the internet at all anymore, according to the theory. Real people are likely to be found in small communities circulating niche interests, such as on forums like Doomworld or through servers on Discord or Slack. 

If I had heard about this theory before the rise of AI, I would have been highly skeptical of it. But now that we are in a world where tools such as ChatGPT and Sora exist, I’m more inclined to believe this theory, or at least parts of it.

 

Here’s some sources that piqued my interest in the Dead Internet Theory:

 

Spoiler

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

But what do you guys think? Is there any legitimacy to this theory? Or is just paranoid fantasy?

[Gez]

A few weeks ago I read that Facebook had purged billions, that's billions with a bee🐝, bot accounts. Several times more bot accounts than the entire human population.

https://cybernews.com/editorial/facebook-deleted-billions-fake-users/

 

Also, bots are not necessarily fully automatic. You may still have a few humans behind them. Just using software that lets them write a message on several dozen different accounts at once, each slightly paraphrased so they're not exactly identical so as to fool the simple filters.

 

Unsurprisingly, China, Russia, and to a lesser extent Iran are very invested in using this kind of shenanigans to sow dissension in western countries.

 

Elmo's Xitter is particularly bad; any time you see a checkmarked account you can be pretty much sure that it's a bot because blue checkmarks get promoted visibility, and you get paid on impressions; meaning that you can actually generate more money from Elmo's X-bucks than you paid for the checkmark. All you need to do is make sure your bot is prompted to promote conspiracy theories, white supremacism, and fascism in general so that it will be put on the "protected free speech" category instead of being banned.

[GibFrag]

There’s definitely some truth to it but I don’t think it’s to the level some think it is.  I feel this only affects people who are easily swayed and manipulated online, too. Plus, if you’re not on social media platforms, you’re less likely to be exposed to this sort of thing. YouTube comments are filled with bots too. I doubt there’s that many half naked women interested in some of the tech videos I watch for example, but if you look at the comments of some videos on YouTube you see clearly fake accounts making rather legit looking commentary. 

[Dreemurr Deceevurr]

Dead Internet Theory is cope based off of a regurgitated creepypasta because some people don't want to acknowledge that some people in real life hold the idiotic beliefs that they do so they just blame it on bots. It's repackaged Clinton-tier "everyone i don't like is a russian bot or some shit" garbage. It's one of those terms popularized by a certain type of internet user who thinks the web pre-facebook was fine and dandy and thinks corporations and spambots ruining the web is something new and not something that just magically started happening after 2016. See also: Enshittification, the myth of ethical social media

[Decay]

Should add (brain) before dead in the title as well, because the quality of actual human to human interaction in a vast majority of cases demonstrates just how unbelievably fucking stupid a lot of people are.

[silentzorah]

As an AI based language model, I can assure you that the Internet is certainly not dead and is full of authentic human activity.

[Fonze]

Love some Chris Hemsworthless 🥰

 

Seems like a plausible fear to have, but also I think that there's no money to be made in totally killing the interwebs so it'll prolly just remain as bad as it is now, but less easily identifiable. So a little worse. I think it'll get a little worse than now.

[Kalashnikov47]

On 7/14/2024 at 6:32 AM, GibFrag said:

I doubt there’s that many half naked women interested in some of the tech videos I watch for example, but if you look at the comments of some videos on YouTube you see clearly fake accounts making rather legit looking commentary. 

I do believe they're doing this by copying others' comments. I remember seeing some comments coming from human beings, then I see accounts with names such as first names of women and/or something like "FUCK ME PLEASE!!!111!1111!11oneoneone" with unusual Unicode text substituting letters to get past the filters and women's bare butts as profile pictures, making comments identical to the ones I saw earlier and vice versa.

Edited July 20 by Panzermann11

[scalliano]

Nothing on the Internet is real, including me.

[Xcalibur]

I think it's an exaggeration of a real issue. The fact is, there are lots of active bots & shills, as well as algorithmic & SEO manipulation. That doesn't mean the internet is a house of wax with fake people conversing all day, but not all users are real either. The middle ground exists, which is something we've forgotten it seems.

[Kinsie]

It's pretty dumb, but it did spawn a pretty cool drawing so there's that.

 

 

[yakfak]

its an instructive theory even if it's not true _yet_

it tells you in advance to find smaller communities

seo gods and data miners and ai people don't care what they fuck up

 

edit: and the people in charge of the internet's biggest sites either love that shit or don't know how to stop it

[Mr Masker]

I believe in the Alive Internet Theory, where everything on the internet is completely true and real and correct.

 

Anyway, they found unicorns yesterday, did you hear about that?

[Gez]

AI generated content is so great, let's cram it in absolutely everything, things are only going to be greaterer thanks to AI everywhere:

What's the point of having such manure spreaders? Yeah, there's a disclaimer that "it can make mistake, verify its output" but seriously, how about just not have an AI? That way it would not make mistake and verifying its output would not be needed, as it would have no output.

 

But hey, techbro mentality of release early and patch it along. Don't ask if there's even a point in making that thing in the first place.

[Skullzrawk9]

AI has caused far more harm than good on the internet.

[mrthejoshmon]

I wrote a verbose ramble filled with pretentious wording about how much I despise AI generated crap and those who use it to generate mass produced slop but honestly it ain't worth the effort, the aforementioned slop generators didn't think it was worth it either.

 

It can be spotted a mile off, never looks good or reads well and the appeal will forever be lost on me, it lets the talentless make talentless forgeries that look like talentless forgeries, so what's the appeal and how do people fall for it?

[Stupid Bunny]

8 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

I wrote a verbose ramble filled with pretentious wording about how much I despise AI generated crap and those who use it to generate mass produced slop but honestly it ain't worth the effort, the aforementioned slop generators didn't think it was worth it either.

 

It can be spotted a mile off, never looks good or reads well and the appeal will forever be lost on me, it lets the talentless make talentless forgeries that look like talentless forgeries, so what's the appeal and how do people fall for it?

but how else to write a Doom awards—

[Gez]

11 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

It can be spotted a mile off, never looks good or reads well and the appeal will forever be lost on me, it lets the talentless make talentless forgeries that look like talentless forgeries, so what's the appeal and how do people fall for it?

It generates Content™ rapidly and cheaply.

 

The quality of the content is irrelevant. What matters is the quantity. If you can drown out your competition, you win.

[WASFDDDDD]

On 7/14/2024 at 7:54 AM, Xcalibur said:

I think it's an exaggeration of a real issue. The fact is, there are lots of active bots & shills, as well as algorithmic & SEO manipulation. That doesn't mean the internet is a house of wax with fake people conversing all day, but not all users are real either. The middle ground exists, which is something we've forgotten it seems.

Absolutely true!

 

I also find bots tend to be clustered in already poorly-moderated areas as well. The kind of places where spam, right-wing propaganda, and general unpleasantness were already running rampant, well before LLMs were a thing. AI isn't some evil, scheming mastermind, it's just really good at enabling con artists by allowing them to pump out massive amounts of text to forward some vague agenda, without any sort of boundaries or concern about truth getting in the way

[LexiMax]

On 7/13/2024 at 7:34 PM, Dreemurr Deceevurr said:

Dead Internet Theory is cope based off of a regurgitated creepypasta because some people don't want to acknowledge that some people in real life hold the idiotic beliefs that they do so they just blame it on bots. It's repackaged Clinton-tier "everyone i don't like is a russian bot or some shit" garbage. It's one of those terms popularized by a certain type of internet user who thinks the web pre-facebook was fine and dandy and thinks corporations and spambots ruining the web is something new and not something that just magically started happening after 2016. See also: Enshittification, the myth of ethical social media 

 

I feel like "Dead Internet" a lot more believable these days, and it comes down to economic incentives.

 

Older sites used to use third-party advertising platforms.  These third parties made an active effort to clamp down on inauthentic engagement with their advertising.  If a site owner is getting a bot to repeatedly click on an ad, or even encouraging their users to click on ads as a precondition of using a site, that increases the amount they have to pay the site owners, as well as opening themselves up to complaints from advertisers who find out that their ad spend is being wasted.

 

Modern social media got rid of that barrier - now the same site that generates and tracks engagement also sells advertising.  Because inauthentic engagement doesn't cost them money from site owners, the only people who have to be convinced are the end users themselves and the advertisers.

 

I'm not going to go so far as to accuse any specific social media company of knowingly defrauding their advertisers by giving them analytics they know are 50% bot interactions through their own complicity.  However, I do find it curious how my GMail inbox that I've had since the early 2000's and has been in more leaks than I can count is mostly free of unsolicited spam, while the comments section of most social media sites is absolutely rotten with low effort garbage written by month-old accounts with an avatar you can find on a stock photo site.

 

Somehow, I don't think it's just the scale of social media that's the problem.

Edited July 17 by LexiMax

[Coopersville]

I treat almost every user outside of this forum like they're inhuman. Don't look at my YouTube comments history lol. 

[prfunky]

On 7/13/2024 at 11:08 PM, scalliano said:

Nothing on the Internet is real, including me.

 

You got that right.

 

On 7/17/2024 at 4:01 PM, LexiMax said:

... with an avatar you can find on a stock photo site.

 

Ahh.... that's where I'm screwing up...

 

[LoatharMDPhD]

// bring back dial-up and see how many real humanoids show up to the party....

 

[KenaiPhoenix]

It is not a theory, it is real sadly, I saw it develop in front of my eyes.

 

I will try to make a long story short: saw a post on X/Twitter of a big account called "Historic Videos" or something like that. I was the classic corpo account that share videos and make posts to gather views. Once it posted a famous video of a Turkish news reader that say stuff that it is not too understandable (I had seen it before, it is quite popular) and making fun of the Turkish language. The replies of the post were many, some continuing making fun of the video, others being amazed and some even were correcting the account by saying it was really a wordplay.

 

Now where was the issue? the bot of Historic Videos got a bug or something and uploaded the video without sound, so to any human is would be just a silent newsreader, but for all those replies (there where many) it made sense.

[Astar]

I remember how I wanted to make exactly the same topic, but you were the first, heh.

 

On the one hand, this theory smells like conspiracy theory. On the other hand, sometimes you look on the Internet and begin to believe in the veracity of this theory.

Especially when you see an bot-account that, if I remember correctly, posts on twitter AI-generated pictures of Jesus that get weirder and obscure every time, and the comments on those pictures are mostly other bots, lol.

 

And I don’t think the Internet was better before or people were kinder. Not at all.
But the Internet was certainly not a sterile environment inhabited by corporatocracy and ugly minimalism.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

I saw an interesting thing recently about Polybius and how a lot of individual elements of that story were true, but for entirely mundane reasons rather than there actually being a weird conspiracy to create a mind-controlling video game.  I think Dead Internet Theory is in a similar boat: the original premise of there being some sort of deliberate conspiracy to make us interact with a fake Internet for shadowy and nefarious purposes is almost certainly bogus, but a lot of individual things are happening to kill the usefulness of the web that might look like one taken together.  A big part of it is the net being overtaken by the drive to rake in advertising revenue over any desire to share a genuine passion or useful information.  To some degree I think it's also that there are far fewer people any more interested in running a website just for the passion of sharing an interest, and some of that has gone to more "hidden" places like semi-private chats and such, so worthwhile stuff is even more drowned out since there's less of it in addition to more junk.  And some of it probably is bots with more specifically nefarious purposes but I don't think they're actually the biggest contributor compared to the base level "gimme the ad money" ones.

 

This was pretty much already happening before the current wave of AI stuff, too, that just made it easier to pump-out low effort slop that looks more convincing than the old Markov-chain bot posts.  I've lamented before how the "write a blog for ad money" fad was wrecking the usefulness of search engines well before that.

[fart]

wait.... 123skinlessbigbootylatina isnt real...? and she wasnt actually flirting with me when she said LOOK&%AT**BIO? thought we had something sighh 😞 my hopes and dreams are CRUSHED.

[Majin]

My answer is the funniest answer. I like how conspiratorial people become because they refuse to believe there are people so surface level that they will spend years on social media doing nothing but rewatching sports clips, praising sports players and scrolling for hours liking sports related content. They are indistinguishable from bots. The fact that people are unsure just how much of the internet is botified is a testament to how simple most people are. AI doesn't need to get to the point of some Matrix CIA MARK 15.2 HYERINTEL level shit to replicate humans, they can already mimic the behaviours of most online users through very simple and primitive methods. 

[Daytime Waitress]

6 hours ago, Majin said:

they can already mimic the behaviours of most online users through very simple and primitive methods. 

 

Spouting memes while jacking it to McDonalds pr0n dubbed in Spanish?

Sure sounds like the average internet user.

[Majin]

16 minutes ago, Daytime Waitress said:

 

Spouting memes while jacking it to McDonalds pr0n dubbed in Spanish?

Sure sounds like the average internet user.

This but unironically