Technology

awesome, then we can remove all the ads, no? because bots don't purchase things, no?

The weirdest part won’t be bots outnumbering humans: It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement. … Meanwhile three actual humans are somewhere wondering why the internet suddenly feels so empty.

Hosting shit has become too expensive, and the ads will generate less and less revenue, as it's mostly bots generating clicks and views. This is changing the internet at an incredible pace.

The worst is that any attempt to create a place free of bots will only become a target for LLM companies to gather clean training data.

There's also the fact that an internet full of bots, AI slop, and privacy risks is making more people pull away from the online world. In our poll, 97% of people said the internet today was a hellscape compared to its early days, and it looks like things are only going to get worse.

Looks like the cure is inherent in the disease. Anyone else remember the early 90s when Usenet was just text-based fun and then some motherfucker thought it was a grand idea to run ads? I do, and it's been downhill ever since.

It's sad that it has come to this, but as usual a handful of greedy fuckers have ruined it for the rest of us. (My personal opinion is that big tech could have arrested this downhill slide at any point, even from back in the first days of email spam, but instead have chosen to monetize it every step of the way instead.)

Real humans are already individually opting out, one by one, as we each personally get sick of the slop and realize it's just not helping anymore. For myself I'm only on intermittently, I've ditched all social media, Lemmy is all I participate in now beyond the odd comment here and there, and that seems about right for me at this time.

I adjust it regularly, often just by going offline for days, but I had to see the problem before I could change it. I think that's where a lot of people are, just now seeing it for the first time as a real problem affecting their quality of life directly.

But like any other addiction, the point of turning is different for everyone. These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.

I'm reminded of the episode of TNG where they trapped Moriarity in a simulation so he would think he had taken over the ship.

Maybe we can just have an internet just for billionaires where they have AI produce internet content so they can advertise useless AI products to AI bots run by other billionaires while the rest of us go on with our normal lives in the real world?

People are just going to get sick of the Internet, if they haven't already, and start to look at it like a necessary evil they have to use to do certain things instead of what it once was which was fun and exciting. It's sad.

Locally we have been setting up some mesh systems. Its been fun work. One of the best things about it is:

1. All traffic is human.
2. No survalance

Its in the early phases but its been a sucess so far.

I don't host things on the open internet anymore. I have a small set of services I host for a group of friends and family and I set them up with tailscale.

On the flip side, I've been constantly frustrated because every time I have an idea for some little quality of life tool that involves pulling data from a site I would normally have to browse to directly, I can't do it because everything is captcha'd to all hell.

I think http/https is dead at this point.

Guess I'll just have to hang out with humans in the physical world.

Bots don't generate money you dough brains.

I want the bots to start scamming each other now.

That's crazy! "The round error" was actually my nickname in high school!

Your mum is a rounding error.

Does everyone here have a wired subscription or something?

It’s paywalled. No way the commenters here read the article.

A better metaphor is that the signal to noise ratio is getting so small, that the internet is becoming useless

The Metaverse could've been a platform free of AI, offering a protected version of the Internet for people to be themselves. It's kinda where we may be headed anyway. Instead we got this...