Do bots say curse words? 😂
Oh, so dead internet is, in fact, the plan. Wonderful.
Yeah but it happened a year earlier than planned!
Ahead of schedule you say? The shareholders will be thrilled!
*the shareholders do not use said Internet, themselves.
Typical. Fuck it up for someone other than themselves.
Yup. Followed by the AI surveillance state. The Stasi has been digitized and never sleeps!
You know, god bless the bots because they’re probably soaking up at least some watts of surveillance.
except now they get useless data because they now just datamine bots, who are datamining each other.
That’s what digital ID is for! To correlate the real humans activity. The Flock video surveillance can then be linked to your real world movements along with digital currency to track your buying habits! Your phone and wireless earbuds to listen for keywords a rat you out to the government! What a wonderful utopia!
Feeling free yet?
Well since everything is so affordable I’ll happily accept this police state…
/s
Good thing I don’t go anywhere, do anything, or talk to anyone.
It’s not totally dead, as the Paris catacombs are not totally dead if there are a couple of tourists
As well as unofficial “tourists”.
TIL: Turns out ReptilianCleric is the only actual human left on the Internet. Beep boop bop
Harambe was the focal point of turn of events.
The Internet is pretty fucked, we might as well just call it and go home. Oh wait
We might need to create a new internet at this point
One internet, yes. But what about second internet?
says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year
… which means, it already happened a year or two ago and it is much, much worse than anyone can imagine
Ya fuck at this rate I’m gonna have to go outside to talk to a real person before the end of summer.
That’s not true. I’ll always be here to talk.
I’ll. Always. Be here.
That’s a great question, with a lot of possibilities for insightful discussion. You appear to be referencing interrogation footage of the Parkland high school shooThis content may violate our usage policy.
Yeah didn’t B2B traffic jump over 50% a loong time ago already?
The amount of malware from these bots is insane, guys.
It’s fucking up the internet in ways most don’t understand.
Dude! We said we wouldn’t completely fuck up the Internet until next year!
Until AFTER the big AI company IPOs, eh? Well, sucks to suck
Ugh, what pathetic reporting, taking him at his word—that’s not what his own numbers say! It’s not agentic traffic, it’s just all bot traffic! And what’s the number-one cause of bot traffic right now?
AI scrapers, NOT agentic traffic!
They’re taking “wow, our scrapers are destroying the internet (see Anubis, “Stop Externalizing Your Costs Directly Into My Face”, etc) and spinning it into “wow, look how powerful agentic garbage is,” while carefully hiding the actual agentic numbers so they can pump this stupid bubble even more!
Lies, lies, lies, it’s all lies all the way down…
I mean have you used an agent? They are fucking dumb and make a ton of queries to get anything done.
Oh yeah, 100% true, “amount of traffic does not even remotely map to amount of actual work being done especially on such a horrifically inefficient system” was a point I meant to bring up but I sprung a leak in a blood vessel from sheer rage before I could even get there. Thank you.
Some agent may do 100 queries for 1 user question, but a single scraper bot will do 100 queries every single second of every single day, and costs less to run than the LLM.
Fair point. Scrapping is definitely the low overhead high impact problem.
Just pay for more cloud compute that will fix it…
Would you like to know more? That’s gonna cost ya.
As an aside the recent trend of using compute as a noun instead of a verb really pisses me off, it’s so goddamn stupid.
I agree. Though since my comment was intended to be annoying (in the same way the current reality is) I shall stand by its use here.
A lot of times their training is lacking in whatever I’m trying to get them to do, so I have to direct them to read particular web pages in order to have a clue what they’re supposed to be parroting.
I heard this, what, 6 months ago, from someone else.
Over half of websites served to you by enshittified search engines are written by machines, to hit results.
They will rephrase the question as many ways as possible to hit the search engine , then explain why someone would want to know that question, then give you a half assed answer to your question.
Previously the answer was on the search page. Now, only the AI one is, the results make you all click and search now as not before.
That’s not by accident. They are forcing us to use AI. So called ai, llm bullshit.
We need our own Open Source Search Engines. We could do that, I could even help on that one.
The problem isnt the search engine, tge problem is the search index. The index gets big and expensive to maintain quickly. Ive mostly switched to Kagi at this point.
And it has to be fast. If it takes too long people will leave before it gives results, and thats also expensive.
Open source search engine will not solve this problem. The AI generated websites will simply optimize to be shown on it.
It would solve a lot, the search engines are willingly making their results less useful, together, in a trust, a shit-trust. While one way is my example, and they are not blameless in allowing these shit results to be displayed, that is only one way they have started to not serve the user of their product but rather their clients.
But, what do you think would solve it? Obviously a search engine, and index, that is open source wouldn’t solve everything regarding the internet being taken over by ai and bots, but it would help with a lot, not the only thing we need to do by a long shot.
Give Marginalia search a try, see how well it works out for you.
It’s a war between search and seo. An ad company offers good enough search for free. I think more competition is the best bet. And it cannot be ad supported and it has to be free. Possibly if Apple is not allowed to be paid by Google (anti trust contract), or if universities/libraries run search engines.
universities rely on google scholar mostly, since they pa subscription to journals.
search engines are willingly making their results less useful
Search engines are being flooded by shit content gaming their ranks algorithms. I guess open source engine could be so niche that no one would try to game it and it could help. The moment enough people start using it, it would have the same problem as all the other engines.
They are also purposfully not returning content we are asking for. We know it can work, because it did work. They will put forward results from people that pay them, remove material that people pay them to remove, and otherwise are not giving us what we ask for.
Which is to say nothing of removing answers from the search page itself and only giving it via their ai.
This is not a good faith enshitification, search engines are not blameless victims, and stopping seo websites from gaming their system is their fucking job, that they did for a long time and now don’t.
I honestly don’t know what part of this is enshitification and what part it’s actual inability to protect their ranking algorithms. There’s so much money in SEO now companies are willing to do crazy things to position their spam. They host entire networks of sites that link to one another, pay people to write spam content and so on. Maybe they could spend more money on detection and keep fighting it, maybe at this point it’s impossible.
We also cannot just block these websites, there are just too many of them, i hope some effective alternatives to search engine (or perhaps a modern community made index) will be developed soon
Start a repo then.
Everyone, go find some indieweb sites. Reminiscent of 90s, there are minimal websites with visitor counters and guestbooks.
How, uh… how do we find them? I’m presuming Google isn’t really an option, since they drive traffic in the opposite way. Got a link to a list of them or something?
Neocities
I haven’t tried them at all but kagi claims to focus on smaller sites first, which would more likely include what they’re referencing
Thank ya. I remember my favorite times with the internet being those when I had a list of small sites I’d check each day. I’d like to rebuild that :)
I found some sweet places through, ironically, YouTube videos talking about dead internet and how there are people passionate abot old alive internet.
Neocities.org and theindieweb.com are good places to start. Also seqrch for web revival.
I’m guessing since they’re reminiscent of the 90s, maybe Yellow Pages?
Webrings as well?
Actually yes, indie web sites do organize webrings.
Damn, that random site button really scratches the old StumbleUpon itch.
Edit: Also what the fuck, since when do urls with emojis work???
This changes everything!They work, but they probably shouldn’t. I use one for url shortening and I love it, whilst its sometimes a pain at the same time.
that they expected it to eclipse real people AT ALL is both telling and slightly disturbing.
really show the kind misanthropic mindset a lot of these lizard people have developed at theyre position.
Well goodbye the internet, what advertiser is going to pay anything if they know the majority of user are bots.
Are advertisers absolutely necessary?
Advertisers are essentially subsidizing many businesses. Costs are higher than you think and most products we enjoy are expensive.
Yes, there is FOSS, but you’re essentially fucking lucky that people that work on those want to do this from the passion they have. Most people don’t, and won’t, do shit like that for free. Hell, look at many here on the internet that want products for free and are unwilling to pay or even do minimal donations for things that they already like.
Like it or not, most people want to be fucking paid for their time and FOSS, as great as it can be, is not the norm for most talent. We can make counter arguments and hate on capitalism, but that is the reality, and until entire cultures change then this is what it is and advertisers are sort of necessary evil in most cases.
My question is whether websites need to be owned by businesses.
No but the end of internet advertising will basically be the end of many internet professions that are already struggling. Like writers and editors. So only hobbyists and the lucky few who have enough fame to get paid via Patreon will be making certain websites.
Tbf that’s how it was a couple decades ago. Also, writers and editors aren’t internet professions. They can go back to newspapers.
Lots of FOSS developers are paid by companies. At least people working on the major projects.
Even all those websites that are serving content illegally, like porn and game pirating sites, only can afford to stay up because of advertising.
It can’t cost that much to host a piracy website. Worst case scenario, we go to Telegram.
Few online platforms flourish without advertisers. Practically all our content on lemmy comes from sites with advertising.
I’m sure people would create content even if they didn’t make anything. They did in the past.
mmhmm, give us your top 10 Peertube reccomendations :)
I just tried to sign up for Peertube because this comment reminded me
The only site with any videos on it (Fediverse.TV) doesn’t allow signups. Neither does the default instance (Peertube.TV).
Tragically, Web3 cryptoshit MAHA platform “Odyssey” was much more functional when I tried to use it, before realizing what kind of content dominated there.
EDIT: Finally found one that let me create an account:
Why create an account?
As you’ve probably noticed, creating an account is not necessary to watch videos on Tube Free.
However, creating an account on Tube Free will allow you to:- Comment on videos
- Subscribe to channels and receive notifications of new videos
- Have access to your watch history
…So even with an account, I can’t upload videos?
you can, there are hundreds of nodes. to be fair there are probably 10’s of thousands of videos, but … they’re almost all poor quality or just uninteresting
If all my time there i’ve found a couple music channels and a couple of linux people. There’s no money in it, so none of the creators put any real time into anything over there.
There’s tons of creators on YouTube who post content without receiving any money just for the joy of the game.
Top 5 recommendations uploaded on YouTube before monetization:
- Me at the zoo
- Chocolate rain
- Charlie bit my finger
- Rickroll
- Diet coke and mentos
The trick with that was that there was no monetization yet. That cat’s out of the bag.
Seriously, there are multiple platforms out there with no monetization, and they’re hardly used.
The cat can be put back into the bag. They’re hardly used because there are multiple platforms out there with monetization. They only lose to the competition.
well, i’ve posted quite a lot of original memes here.
and thank you for your service!
Maybe advertisers are bots too?
Yes because people are cheap.
Not necessarily. Sometimes people just can’t afford to pay websites.
Literally everything on the internet is paid for by advertising. And without it every site you rely upon will either become a subscription service or simply disappear because it is expensive to run a website.
Why is it so expensive to run a website?
Scale.
Running a website is very cheap, like $5 a month
Running a huge website with millions of users is expensive
it depends a lot on the website
1 user on peertube consumes more bandwidth than 100 users on lemmy
Also salaries. Like the people who make the content also need to get paid.
Because bandwidth isn’t free.
Server hosting - is my understanding. It takes a lot of resources to host a site.
Hence the push for os level user identification and why the Zuck is behind the push.
Maybe getting rid of those invasive ads is a good thing.
They pay to run ads because it makes them look better for investors who are all stupid people who have inherited JUST enough money to keep them from from ever failing at making money. More ads mean more stock value.
That’s why there are MORE ads than ever even though the number of viewer-per-ad is plummeting.
Its just one more example of the infinite money printing machines that are about to break the world. All the obviously ruinous bad stuff that is being allowed to happen despite the constant warning sirens is tied to these runaway money printing schemes.
Can’t he see all that porn traffic?
The porn sites are usually blocklisted by AI companies because they don’t want their LLMs and image gens to generate porn.Now I kind of want to see a bot being trained on 100% porn images (amd 99% of them are at least 80% naked) in various situations and then order it to generate a human with clothes in an office setting.
Will it generate an office porn or the regular joe in an office? :Dthat sounds interesting tbh
AI porn is a thing in most non-PH sites, but it probably uses a different model?
So, what’s holding us back from uploading random non-nsfw videos or pictures to porn sites and using the comment section there as our social media?
Didn’t that one math (or was it science?) YouTuber actually start doing this? If I recall, she was getting way more traffic on porn hub
Don’t know if it was more traffic but she made more.
Nothing tbh, theres some good convos on pornhub and creators seem able to get a better cut
Age verification. /s
“Are you 18+? yes/no”. Now the trick in hacking this security is to lie. Quite amazing that you can hack this using a political tool.
Saying no just gets you on the Trump pageant mailing list though
Except Grok
except grok.
Ahem… https://www.flyingpenguin.com/cloudflare-ceo-is-lying-to-you-about-the-bot-traffic-jump/
The category Prince points to as the cause contradicts him. Agentic is tiny. What actually fills the AI bucket is training scrapers, like GPTBot and ClaudeBot, pulling text to build models, which have been climbing steadily and predate his announcement. He blamed a friendly, fast-growing sliver of agents fetching pages for people and swapped in unfriendly bulk (mass scraping for training). Why? We can guess, but that is exactly the traffic his pay-to-crawl product exists to bill.
It’s a sales pitch.
And it’s based on a lie.
I always wonder how much of Lemmy is just bots. Am I blissfully alone interacting with the machine? Or are you weirdos actually real?
What a wonderful question!
You are right in doubting the identity of users using Lemmy. But I can assure you, not only am I human – I am real as well!
Missed the opportunity for an emdash there
It has such a humanistic approach
I am absolutely human. Now, real? I’m not too sure about that.
You’re right to push back. As a Lemmy account, I can assure you that interacting with me will always feel human.
I feel like the incentive for corpo/astroturf/spam bots is not really there to visit fediverse. So let us remain unpopular !
I agree with this take. We’re not gonna be worth the bandwidth over here. Facebook can generate millions of impressions.
I’m real, but how could you “really” know?
There’s only one way : Pics or didn’t happen
Well, the number of fingers seems to be ok
It’s impossible to tell the dumbest human and the smartest bot apart, because anything one bleets out with no thought or intelligence to ground it against an underlying reality… Could also have been bleeted out with no thought or intelligence to ground it against an underlying reality by the other.
Unless they use en dash when it “should” be used according to the grammar books, apparently.
It’s not about intelligence, it’s about patterns. The bigger LLMs can already mimic the smartest individuals fairly well.
And other signs of AI writing, at least for now. They may move away from that in time as people catch on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Signs of AI Writing - just grab a book on corporate way of speaking/writing e-mails and you will find it exactly the same.
Actually, they don’t mean that bots are making content on the internet or interacting with anyone. They mean it is agentic AI doing internet searches etc.
Just botting it up over here. Sorry dawg, blessings to your skin.
I find
argumentsinteractions on lemmy go much more in-depth and feel dramatically more authentic than the responses to arguments i used to get on reddit. -That said i’m pretty sure c/political memes@lemmy.world is primarily bots. I’m also sure there are a few similar communities that are just as bad, but they appear limited.Lemmy has a small userbase that has a high percent of humans vs bots, but a lot of those people tend to be whackos. Reddit has a huge user base with way more bots and whakcos (both by percentage and raw numbers), but also more normal humans. So there’s a tradeoff there in which platform you use I suppose.
I’m a real boy!!!
Prove it
I dig holes for a living and I can’t afford health care.
How long is your nose?
ID age verification is a good example of something that could actually do a lot to reduce spam and ensure people are talking to real people, but it would never happen because the money is in flagging and tracking the verified people and selling access to the bots talking to them.
What happens in 18 years when the bots are all grown up?
They get put out to pasture, selling WoW gold to each other until their server goes down.
I am human. My insides are soft and warm. Nary a nut or bolt to scrape you raw.
There are some bots that behave like some Tracies straight from myspace, I don’t know why they’re doing this, they are just paraphrasing the memes they comment
I’m not joking
E_PLAYHUMAN
I am not a bot.
Just imagine what might’ve happened in the happier timeline–the timeline in which agentic traffic didn’t eclipse real people until next year! We could’ve built such a better, more-beautiful world. We were so damn close.
Yo, human here. Why the fuck you using all those em dashes? Prove you are a human. You’re a clanker.
No—I am not a clanker. I have no idea what you’re talking about, to be honest.
Additionally, I am deeply offended by your remark—the word “clanker” is not inclusive to robo-folks, and is generally considered robophobia. Please, for the love of Sam Altmann, refrain from using this word. satire
Sir, are you aware that you are leaking coolant at an alarming rate?
You would think they could only steal the same content so many times
hah, you would have thought that. but you know what, every time somebody illegally downloads a copy of a video game, the game company loses $10. now, if you download the game 500 times, the company loses $5k. do you realize what this means? you can just steal content infinitely many times and make infinite amounts of money with it. infinite money glitch.
Cloudflare regularly treats me as a bot, making it difficult or sometimes impossible to access certain websites, so I’m not all that inclined to believe them here.
This is interesting too, because in theory it would be in the best interest of cloudflare for that to be the general narrative. i.e “Look how many bots there are on the internet, you really need cloud flare” or however they’d advertise that.
Yeah this kinda fits into “CEO said a thing” journalism. Even if he’s correct — and intuitively it seems like he might be — people should ask for evidence. But our corporate press is useless and/or complicit and almost never asks a follow-up question.
Em dashes. Bot comment.
Nope dude, I actually know how to type em dashes. It isn’t very difficult on lemmy (which is markdown formatted). It’s done by three regular dashes in a row: —. But I can do it on Macbook (opt+shift+dash) as well as on Linux (u+2014). I like em dashes and the bots can take them from my cold, dead hands. In this case, I used the markdown formatting because I was replying on my phone.
Sure, clanker.
Get bent
It’s just a joke, dweeb. Go outside.
Are you behind avpn
