- I only see two outcomes for this problem : an internet of verified identities (start by uploading your ID card). Or a paid internet, where it doesn't matter who you are, but since you're going to pay for that email or that reddit account, the probability that it's AI spam is greatly reduced.
And i'm looking forward to none of them.
by amiantos
21 subcomments
- Why is it being called dead internet theory when, as far as I can tell, what's really happening is that big centralized systems are being overrun with bots? The internet existed and was pretty great before these large centralized systems came into being.
Anyone can still run a blog/website, and/or their own discourse server. There's no need to mourn for these centralized systems that largely existed only to exploit us in some way. Let's celebrate "small internet theory", an internet where exploitation is effectively impossible because every company that tries it is overrun with AI bots. That sounds awesome to me personally, but I was also up late last night watching clips of Conan O'Brien from 1999 and the nostalgia for that era / what the internet was like back then hit me so hard it was almost painful.
- You know.. I keep thinking this might be a good thing in some ways. AI spam could save us from the worst of the current social media status quo, the toxicity of the attention "economy", but flooding it so thoroughly nobody wants to engage with it anymore. Maybe the world can collectively "wake up" and "go outside" by turning towards local and more intimate communities for social interactions..
It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything..
Things are definitely going to change in significant ways. The internet of the past is definitely dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
by toddmorey
1 subcomments
- I see many, many startups that promise to be an automated marketing agent that will do this exact thing: scour sites for conversations and post links to your product.
Obviously that burns down the human Internet, but it’s also a business that will have a short lifespan and bring about its own demise.
I guess they don’t care about anything enduring as long as they can grab some quick cash on the way out.
- Maybe the only parts of a future internet people will actually hang out in is going to be one where any profit-making is completely de-incentivized. No recommendations. No product reviews. No opinions on companies or services. More slow web. Maybe we'll slowly head back to what websites used to look like when Yahoo was the biggest search engine.
- The Internet was always full of bots. Not chatbots, but bots like crawlers, scrapers, automated scripts. That was fine.
What the OP is talking about is bots that participate in public discourse. That's the actual problem.
I think it can be handled to a degree though. Private communities, private Internet on top of existing Internet, and social media platforms without public APIs and with strict, enforceable ToS would all help.
by abcde666777
2 subcomments
- For a while video was a holdout of sorts - e.g. if someone posted video content of themselves or their voice you could trust a real person was behind it.
But now convincing fake video generation is easily accessible, so one more holdout stands to fall.
It does seem like some kind of ID system is going to be the only way. Sucky but inevitable.
I often have the following thought: technological advancement, for all its boons, inevitably leads down destructive roads in the long run. Sooner or later we open a pandora's box.
by starkeeper
0 subcomment
- I just searched for a video game tip: "Bannerlord II where to sell clay?" and google's top result was an AI generated page FOR THIS GAME that directed me to ebay.
Also, I forgot to mention: google AI overview included the AI garbage page as it's answer.
It's dead Jim.
- Emacs will solve this too:
https://github.com/tanrax/org-social
:-)
- What does it matter who wrote it as long as you like the content? If the content is posted on a network that allows robotic agents to post, and you don't like it, just sign on to a different network.
I imagine it will be way closer to Ghost in the Shell/Cyberpunk in the end than we realize.
- I have a decent-enough filter for AI-written nonsense:
- banner blindness to blue check accounts (instantly scroll past, the blue check is extremely prominent visually)
- a very long Ublock Origin text filter regex for emojis (green check mark in particular) and $currentHotTopic keywords where the signal to noise ratio is close to 0.
- The internet is not dead though - it's bursting with life, both human and LLM claw like. It's only going to get more so as time goes on. Re:
>Can we go back to an internet like this? I guess we can’t.
Gary Brolsma is still at it with Numa Numa (2023) https://youtu.be/ZBKm1MBsTbk. There's just a bunch of other stuff out there too.
- I think that we are going to see more and more of this. To the point where most interactions you have online will likely be with bots. So I started building something that actually has a chance of fixing it: a social network for only humans.
I wrote about it here: https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
- do you think small, invite-only communities will end up being the last holdout for genuine human conversation online? or will bots eventually infiltrate those too?
- This post's title is hyperbolic at best. At best the author is noticing what most people have known for a long time, there are bots on the internet. Most interactions I have online are with real people. Maybe we will end up with a dead internet, but moderation is still possible currently.
The elephant in the room is that a lot of social media companies have a conflict of interest. They can juice their user metrics by not moderating bots as well as they could be.
- Tbh I don't care if I speak to a human or a bot as long as they are "useful"; by useful I mean if they provide me useful information but then again humans can provide unique information that bots can not. But I think identity is not relevant anymore, what's relevant is reputation. People think internet bots are bad per se but we need to build useful bots, just like there are chat bots that are useful on various platforms like Telegram, Discord or whatever other platforms people use.
- Isn't this more about identity crisis? Not in the psychological sense but in the internet sense? Who is real who isn't? Crypto proof of work idk? Your profile like d LinkedIn or Hacker News or something gives your clawbot x credits worth of legit automated queries or rate limits on your behalf? It could be flipped upside down where we don't spend our eyes off on reading websites anymore, it just goes and gets it for us but I may be hallucinating.
by jeandejean
3 subcomments
- Next step is: we get back to speaking to each other in the real world. That would successfully close the loop.
- I imagine soon there will be small scale Tailscale style semi private networks popping up with no AI content and no regards to draconic identity collection laws.
by talkingtab
1 subcomments
- It is the corporate internet - the one by the corporation, for the corporation that is dead. Or at least everything in it is dead. The death blow is AI, but it was almost there anyway.
The good news is that the community internet - for the community, by the community - is just starting.
What is a community internet? The internet is layered protocols. UDP, ICMP, TCP, HTTP, HTTPS etc. The community internet is just a new layer of protocols. Coming soon.
- I'm curious what tools do people use to apply to jobs automatically? Would this be automatically flagged by recruitment systems as AI? We have never had a problem like this at our company but now I am little paranoid
- The real problem isn't that bots exist — it's that we have no trust infrastructure for the internet. We can verify domains with SSL, authenticate users with OAuth, but we have zero standard for verifying that an AI agent is good at what it claims. The dead internet is a discovery/trust problem, not just a spam problem.
- I'm here for it in the short-term. As the market continues to saturate, most of the people building this stuff will flame out. Eventually, I suspect we hit a tipping point where the ROI is too low (not enough real human engagement, just other bots) and the flood dials back.
by chuckadams
0 subcomment
- The funny thing about the LinkedIn post is that the parody is dead-on as to the kind of mindless slop a human on LI would post. LinkedIn was the Dead Internet before LLMs were even a thing. And I guess AI doesn't even have to be posting everything for Dead Internet Theory to hold, it just has to be the default perception in order to cause everything to be treated skeptically.
I think I'll just take up blacksmithing.
by protocolture
0 subcomment
- I reckon we are going find an inverse metcalfes at some stage where the value of a network is proportional to the square of its connected users, minus the square of the number of connected bots. Heck I would be surprised if meta hadnt figured this out, or wasnt on the way to figuring it out.
- > And of course let’s not forget AI spamming OSS repos with nonsensical PRs. What’s even funnier is when the reviewer turns out to be AI too.
What's even funnier is this is literally how "agent teams" (the latest hotness) work. They just do it all on your laptop rather than spamming GitHub.
- This is the founding thesis of the dead internet theory: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
- People need to look long and hard at how they are using technology, and ask how technology should be used. Every single technological trend for the past 10 years has been smoke and mirrors, promising utility of an iPhone but with deliverables closer to a blockchain full of links to jpegs.
- "I only see two outcomes for this problem…"
Or, you know, the internet just dies and we all meet at bowling alleys again.
- In nature, sometimes death is the prerequisite of life: Think of the dead leaves on the forest ground.
I think the age of algorithmic curation is dead - but it may, through a „RenaiSSance“, bring back true human connection.
by alexchantavy
0 subcomment
- Vrei sa pleci dar numa numa iei
numa numa iei
numa numa numa iei
bring back the old internet
by Bombthecat
0 subcomment
- We are closing in on the "personal bubble internet" bots create news, videos and comments for your personal liking.
- Lots of interesting ideas to fix it, I’ll offer mine: let it die.
The grand bargain of the web is gone and it ain’t coming back.
by butterlesstoast
2 subcomments
- Really makes me wonder. Is there anything we can do to revive the internet or is it time to let the golden age go? : (
by ingohelpinger
0 subcomment
- just go out, what you are seeking is real life which happens outside, not in front of a display.
- I am still pissed that Wikipedia calls it a conspiracy theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
Wasn’t WP supposed to be impartial and avoid passing judgement?
- Maybe we should get more Jannies. They only cost zero dollars and zero cents
by rustystump
1 subcomments
- Everyone here is so far from a normie it is almost painful. Dead internet is an outcome of supply and demand.
The fundamental issue is that a plurality of humans pref the direction things have gone and are moving in. Is it a good direction? By this crowd’s standards, no.
To be clear, i dont like either but when i watch the speed kids swap between 5 insta accounts and 3 reddit accounts, it seems the majority are happy with it.
- Reddit in particular is overwhelmed by bots. There are small niche communities where it’s mostly people talking to people, but the vast majority of popular posts are made by bots, voted on by bots and commented on by bots.
It’s not even like commercial astroturfing, it’s just karma farming and public sentiment manipulation.
by halyconWays
0 subcomment
- The only place that reminds me of the old Internet is VRChat, funny enough. You're guaranteed to be interacting with a nerdy, culturally similar human who's present in the moment.
- Just yesterday in a local non profit organization's Signal groupchat a user who had just offered to take meeting minutes the day prior emitted an open claw error message to the chat. They are now banned from the organization.
by artemonster
1 subcomments
- I think next step will be an isolated version of invite-only internet where you have to be physically present with your invitee to give them access. There will be a beautiful navigation widget where you can access a unified "addon" to any page: community moderated comment section, version history of that page, backlinks, carefully curated "related" section(so that you can continue browsing beautiful human written content on 1910 era steam locomotives, similar to 90s era webrings), donate button so that you can support he author and much more! Oh, the dream
by jesse_dot_id
1 subcomments
- Thankfully, humans excel at finding solutions to problems.
by jruohonen
1 subcomments
- So, as I share his thoughts, I've been wondering: why haven't we seen any real innovations in this space?
Mastodon wasn't really it and neither was Substack, although maybe it got slightly closer. TikTok and Telegram, maybe, for different reasons, but they'll face the same destiny.
I'd suppose the much despised "mainstream media" might be a winner here eventually. But beyond that, I am thinking about something like the following:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/10/uk-societ...
by ticulatedspline
1 subcomments
- Kinda been dead a while, also not dead there's still good stuff out there. Lots of it, but it's in the corners and under the carpets. Things created in the original spirit of the "let me show you my interests" that the older web was built on.
While back was toying with the idea of building out a new web on a new protocol (not http based). Thus no existing browser would understand it. Deliberately obscure to force a "Reset" button of sorts.
Though would be short lived, over time we've learned to ruin stuff faster and faster. I'm not sure there's any network so alien that it could hold on to that golden era of innocence from the past, it would be found then expediently and expertly exploited.
- I have to use LinkedIn to sell. I only occasionally look at the feed but I am ruthlessly muting or blocking anyone who is blatantly foisting their AI drivel on other humans. I’ve had enough of this shit.
- Dead internet prophecy.
- Ironic that there’s a dead bot comment at the bottom of this article trying to pose as a human
- Good fucking riddance. Time to start actually talking to each other again.
by cawksuwcka
1 subcomments
- fuck the internet. eventually everything needs to get fucked.
- 1) Holy fuck I'd borderline forgotten about Numa Numa
2) Reddit... doesn't have much of an incentive to fix the astroturf issue. The site "organically" censors, a lot
- Well, it's not such terrible news, is it?
I get nostalgia for the 90s/00s, but that time was never coming back anyways.
The best we can hope now is for people to be less online. And if it comes from people drowning in AI crap, I think it's kind of funny.
- [dead]
by Ancalagon
3 subcomments
- Hey it’s what executives want. Fake everything. Slop and robots everywhere. Have at it, I say. Maybe then people will go outside again
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