• Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    FYI 90% of those bots are scrapers and natural automation tools which are harmless.

    • hemmes@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Yeah, and bots are software setup and configured by humans to do things for humans. It’s still kind of humans using the internet, just not actively at the keyboard.

  • snownyte@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    The internet is ‘dead’ anyways, what’re you talking about?

    People frequent like the same 5 sites anymore. Privacy is clinging onto a thread. Porn has too much influence and control in terms of content. Users are two-faced pricks at a given turn. Too many verification/captcha systems. Too much data farming. Flat, dull and feature-less website designing. Anything that was remotely good got shut down or plugged with ads.

    The bots are just the death knoll.

    Oh, remember the time when people once thought that bots on the internet was a conspiracy theory? Bet they feel like fools now. Like in this report here

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The internet is ‘dead’ anyways

      It’s Eternal September like it always has been. I’m enjoying Lemmy. Maybe your post was written by an AI, in which case, “Jolly good show!”

    • dynamic_generals@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Porn has too much influence and control in terms of content.

      Would you expand on this? I’m interested to know what’s being referred to.

      • bartolomeo@suppo.fi
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        7 months ago

        Nobody is really interested in what their step sister is doing, but we don’t really mind finding out, either.

  • TheOneWithTheHair@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    But is the Internet dying? The thing it doesn’t say is if the human participation is dwindling.

    To keep it simple, I’ll work with small numbers. Imagine there are 10 humans online. Now imagine 1 bot on online. Bots are 9% (1 in 11) of this imaginary online community. A year later, those same 10 humans are still online, but there are now 10 bots online; the bots are 50% of the community. This statistic can lead you to think there is less human participation when nothing happened to the humans. The difference is the raw number of bots. This is what I believe is happening, about the same number of humans, just an increasing number of bots, scraping, posting, etc.

    X/Twitter is dying because of mismanagement.

    • blurg@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Let’s extend this thought experiment a little. Consider just forum posts; the numbers will be somewhat similar for articles and other writings, as well as photos and videos.

      A bot creates how many more posts than a human? Being (ridiculously) conservative, we’ll say 10x more.

      On day one: 10 humans are posting (for simplicity’s sake) 10 times a day, totaling 100 posts. Bot is posting 100 a day. For a total of 200 human and bot posts; 50% of which are the bot.

      In your (extended) example, at the end of a year: 10 humans are still posting 100 times a day. The 10 bots are posting a total of 1000 times a day. Bots are at 90%, humans 10%.

      This statistic can lead you to think human participation in the Internet is difficult to find.

      Returning to reality, consider how inhuman AI bots are, with each probably able to outpost humans by millions or billions of times under millions of aliases each. If you find search engines, articles, forums, reviews, and such are bonkers now, just wait a few years. Predicting general chaotic nonsense for the Internet is a rational conclusion, with very few islands of humanity. Unless bots are stopped.

      Right now though, bots are increasing.

      • TheOneWithTheHair@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Bots are increasing. But the Internet is not dead/dying, just changing. Many of the “The 10 bots are posting a total of 1000 times a day.” are repost bots merely parroting human generated content.

        I wonder, though, if this will cause the scrapers to be impacted by the reposters or other AI generated content.

          • TheOneWithTheHair@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            So change means “dying”? So every time a tadpole evolves into a frog, a tadpole dies? Should we have protest signs that read, “FROGS KILL TADPOLES! DOWN WITH FROGS”?

            • blusterydayve26@midwest.social
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              7 months ago

              But what if I wanted to communicate with humans instead of propaganda-bots? Then yes, that Internet is dead, and there’s no real fucking reason to be on most of those sites.

            • SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zip
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              7 months ago

              No, that is not what I was talking about. In the current environment it is completely possible for some people to only have interactions with bots online, without even knowing. This may get worse and worse in the future. THAT is what “dead” internet implies, lifeless online interactions essentially.

              • TheOneWithTheHair@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                I suspect there will still be online interactions with humans, just more interactions with bots. Unfortunately, it’s we humans behind the mess. Even if we pass laws to stop it (or even forced labels of “I’m a bot” on bot accounts), some people won’t play by the rules. So the change is going to happen. We can try to persuade the public, but we know how well that works:

                A parody of the piracy ad from the 1980s 'home taping is killing music and it's illegal' cassette tape with crossbones. The words read 'online bots are killing social media and it sucks'.

                So what do you propose be done about it?

  • sundray@lemmus.org
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    7 months ago

    I’m sure it’ll be fine… oh, totally unrelated: has any one been on Usenet lately?

    • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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      7 months ago

      Most Usenet discussion groups don’t even get spambot posts these days.

      • Zeoic@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        There are chat groups with usenet? How does that work? I have only ever seen it used for downloading stuff.

        • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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          7 months ago

          Usenet started out as a forum-like system, with individual messages grouped into discussion threads (the protocol worked kind of like email, with messages indicating which other message they replied to, so that client software could build a tree for each group). That side of it was eventually killed off by lack of good moderation options or support for embedded media.

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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    7 months ago

    Eh, most of those will just be scrapers, and fediverse inter-server communication is technically a bot.

  • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    It’s a bit like Kessler Syndrome. The more bots on the net the more crap we have to filter through, until eventually we can’t use it because there’s too much crap.

    • Aolley@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Do you have a written summary of that? I hate watching videos, and the dark forest book was fun but without a clue I don’t understand the change to internet

      • FanciestPants@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        With proliferation of AI generated content, people aren’t able to identify other human generated content, or be certain that their online interactions are with a bot or human. This scenario has apparently been called the dark forest internet because people will try to preserve their communities by more restrictive curating, effectively hiding both from other humans and bots.

        I like some of Kyle’s videos, and I’m not doing a great job of summarizing all of the points made in this one. I found it worth the 15ish minutes, but probably should have watched it at higher speed.

  • daniyeg@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    can’t read this article, can some explain what their definition of bot is?

      • daniyeg@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        thanks. 32% of malicious traffic is still a lot. the 50% increase in bad traffic in gaming is interesting though.

  • Mubelotix@jlai.lu
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    7 months ago

    Bots don’t run themselves, they are run by humans. I have a lot of them myself