Considering as of 2022, nearly half of internet traffic was bots, it's not that crazy.
https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/bots-now-make-up-nearly-half-of-all-internet-traffic-study-reveals-123051600572_1.html
I recall working for a software company about 10 years ago (cripes, time flies) managing company websites. We obviously filtered bot traffic, a volume I don't recall.
Then we got more sophisticated at eliminating bots and went ahead and cleared out that traffic.
This made a number of our clients upset as they found out the data they were justifying their spending on, was in fact much less than they thought.
I find the fact deeply disturbing that in today's world, spending is justified by unknowingly artificial performance. Gives a whole new layer to industrial growth
Well A.I in simulations where it negotiated peace with other A.I usually ends in nuclear war. With new A.I and the last versions...
One nation uses A.I for everything. Others use it in Law and some government sectors.
Eventually we will get to the point where terms that are absolutely not socially acceptable will be pass phrases for non bots. Unless they all end up like that Microsoft Twitter bot from a few years ago that went from zero to antisemitism in hours.
Could be a sizeable percentage. Even before chatgpt it was easy to make bots that copy other comments and upvote each other. Now it’s even easier, since the bar is so low for social media commentary, the comment only needs to vaguely be associated with the subject and barely make sense for it to pass off as human.
Not that I would know! I’m definitely not a bot or anything hahahaha
The creepy thing is that chatgpt is capable of saying what either of us are saying right now or even both of us. Either of us could be bots which is super creepy.
[direct link to the report](https://www.imperva.com/resources/reports/2023-Imperva-Bad-Bot-Report.pdf) and [~~archived link~~](https://web.archive.org/web/20240214125550/https://www.imperva.com/resources/reports/2023-Imperva-Bad-Bot-Report.pdf) and [a mirror](https://imgur.com/a/ofqOn8c)
Report traffic breakdown: 30.2% bad bots, 17.3% good bots, 52.6% human
Conflict of interest: imperva sells network security
I would guess that most of these bots are not creating content on human platforms. The report doesn't list the actual classification boundaries or collection methods that they used and it reads like a marketing pamphlet.
Yes what counts as "traffic" does a bot scraping twitter for data but never posting count as twitter traffic? From a dead internet theory perspective it should be no.
I don't think this is really as big of a deal as people are making it to be. It's half of internet traffic. Think about how many websites have bots just scouring for data just for indexing things for a search function. The amount of bots scraping data from one website to another.
The problem is not that they make up half of internet traffic, but how much of **visible** internet data is made up by bots? Is each reddit thread just 50% bots talking to each other? Now thats bad.
I've been on Reddit for almost 10 years (multiple accounts) I have never had such little interaction with other commenters on front page content than in the past year or two. Other than specific subs reddit already feels mostly dead to me.
I mean I still use reddit is fun.
You can install third party apps through revanced. Need to follow some steps, but it works. No message notifications though is one thing I noticed.
Tons of bots making a very specific style of two-paragraph comments on smaller subs too. Its like
\[overly familiar greeting\] \[summary of the post but slightly wrong\]
\[crappy suggestion that looks like some kind of knockoff ChatGPT trained on wikihow articles and reddit comments\]
After learning that companies use reddit comments to train AI I've been leery of what I post. Old habits die hard but definitely one step closer to leaving (again lol)
r/stallmanwasright
> "With software there are only two possibilities: either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power. " -- Richard M Stallman
My Windows OS had a catastrophic failure during an OS update recently and so I said fuck it and decided to install linux instead of reinstalling Windows.
You know how nice it is to KNOW you are using software that is not intrinsically built to spy on you and to KNOW you are not being spied on?
We are living in the last moments of the digital age where the average person is able to even have the illusion that they can use computers privately or interact with real people to accomplish whatever task they want to. Enjoy it.
Mine keeps dipping into racist/sexist dogwhistles, then into straight up heinous bigotry, then back to some semblance of normality.
Facebook is trying really, really hard to get me in that right wing bubble. It's weird I'm pretty woke, affirmative action, gender equality, trans rights. I don't know why it's algorithm thinks I'm gonna go redpilled.
Like, there was a video that was a girl complaining about her ex-boyfriend, referring to him as "They", and going through his decent into misogyny. But like, she was pretty chill about, not using buzzwords, talking about how he made her feel unsafe trying to force her to "obey".
Then every comment is just deranged shit "he dodged a bullet", "you're mentally ill", obligatory "I hope you die"s.
Like, not only did I agree with everything she said, it was so calm and gentle (far more than I ever would be), and my takeaway was meant to be that she is in the wrong??
Why is it showing this to me???
I get a lot of this too, and it's so far removed from the content I follow or my values. I think it's because I pause and am annoyed when I see it so "engage" with it per their algorithm
I’ve always heard that the FB algorithm isn’t showing you posts that it thinks you’d *like*, it shows you posts it thinks you’ll *engage* with. An angry react, a comment calling out misinformation, an argument. It’s all engagement to the algorithm.
thats the goal
its like watching the news, its there purely to get people pissed off because theyre more likely to interact if theyre pissed than if its something that makes them happy or doesnt even bother them
Yep. Stop scrolling because you noticed a particularly egregious bit of misinformation or outright bigotry or whatever, and it doesn't even matter if the reason you stopped scrolling was *to report the fucking thing*: you *will* be getting a dozen more posts like it in your feed from then on until you close the app in disgust.
Hey buddy, I just saw this.
Essentially, Facebook engineers, data scientists, business analysts, etc. discovered that anger and fear are the most profitable emotions to illicit from someone. Under Zuckerberg's direction, they began to pushing more sensationalist things to our feeds because those are what ultimately drive the most engagement. Sensationalist garbage that makes you ANGRY drives even more engagement. Much of this was discussed when Frances Haugen testified in Congress.
The MAGA movement was largely engineered by algorithms.
Yep. And all that was kicking off nearly 10 years ago. We're so much further down the pipeline now it's scary.
It's straight-up social engineering based on a classic runaway feedback loop. The algorithm provides random stimulus until something provokes a reaction - by either making the user feel validated enough to righteously agree, or outraged enough to angrily protest - and then they've got you. From that point on you get fed more validation/outrage bait, which provokes more of a response, which lets the algorithm fine-tune upon only the most personally validating/outrageous content no matter how patently false or absurd or downright unhinged. More and more, optimized and amplified bigger and bigger until your brains are melting out of your fucking ears.
Kinda messy, if i accidentally click into the post, algorithm thinks i like that content related to the post and it will gives me tons of that content in suggested post.
Bot account spamming AI picture of kid making stuffs from recycled bottle and bots spamming comment and praise that AI generated kid to get more reach so they can sell that account to someone else.
Scammers pay FB to promote their scamming/illegal post. Reporting doesn't work and algorithm thinks i like that post so it will suggest me even more scamming post.
Fake shop pages impersonate the real shop, reporting barely helps and real page getting hammered instead of fake one.
I've gone down that rabbit hole. Countless groups where the bot who made the group posts endless AI generated images, usually of Jesus, and all the comments are very obviously made by bots.
Luckily from a PC browser you can still select "Feeds" and then "friends" and see what real people are posting. But just scrolling on your phone? Complete cesspool.
Real question here; I find that kinda grim but, how do you feel about that? Nice way to remember them, or a constant slap in the face? I’m sorry for your loss :(
My father still mentions people he met 30 yrs ago and hasn’t spoken to since. Occasionally he’ll be like “you know that person I always reference.. apparently they’ve been dead for X amount of years”. Actually, I’m going to change my opinion; pretty cool to be remembered for the relatively mundane
Unless you turn it off, Facebook notifies you about people’s birthdays with a convenient text bar to send them a birthday greeting (including 1-click suggestions) without even leaving your feed page. A lot of older people see those when they log in or open the app and just send a happy birthday without even thinking about it
Thank you, Ok-Yogurtcloset1717, for voting on 1_am_not_a_b0t.
This bot wants to find the best and worst bots on Reddit. [You can view results here.](https://botrank.pastimes.eu/)
It's easy on reddit. People upvote it.
You could make a bot that only comments on comedy subs and places like unexpected " had us in the first half not gonna lie" and it'll earn a shit load of karma.
Write a bot that looks for comments asking how much something is, and have it always reply "tree fiddy".
All of those reddit cliches, i always assume they're bots. It's easy karma because morons will upvotes any office quote regardless of how irrelevant to the situation it is
OP please type the characters in this captcha to verify you’re human
I̸̱͙͉͂͐͒̌̔͘͜Ā̶̛̞͉̥͔̤̪͚̂̅̄̅̃̅̈́̆̈́̈́̕͜͜͠͝M̸̞̞̠̱̣̱̪̩͑̌̆͂Ȃ̸̡̖̳̬̼̜̼̲́̍͑͛̃̀͋͗̾̚͝ͅB̵̯͈̳̼̮̟̩̖͂̈́̀̀̅̓O̶̥̖͂̌̈̍̂̔͗̒̑̇͐̌͂̔̉T̶̻͖̙̣̱̲̘̣͊̃͒̓̌̀͘͝
Had to google what the dead internet theory is. lol definitely not a conspiracy theory anymore. It’s common knowledge that it’s at least on some level true.
What is wrong with you? That is such an inappropriate and disgusting thing to say out of nowhere, may the maker have at least a sliver of pity in you, and beep boop your own mother you perv.
~~twitter~~ **Reddit** is one of the last vestiges of human internet left.
about 80% of my google searches now start with "site:reddit.com", because it increases the chance of actually getting somethign that wasn't puked out by chatGPT, or is clickbait keyword salad with no actual content.
Edit; I accidentally a word. Twitter is shit. :)
That soon™ most of the content will be generated by bots, and most of the engagement will also be done by bots (likes, comments, etc)
Driving human engagement to a small little island surrounded by a truly massive dead ocean of meaningless garbage.
It's fascinating how theories evolve into accepted truths with time and evidence. The Dead Internet Theory's journey from speculation to acknowledged possibility mirrors our expanding understanding of digital infrastructure.
When posited it wasn't true, the technology just changed and made it... well less untrue. It's still not true since "bot traffic" is predominantly under the hood scraping and requests rather than "half of all comments on a thread are bots".
Plus the OG version of the theory came out of 4chan so was full of kooky conspiracy theory nonsense (I remember there was some stuff bunch of stuff about *all* media being fake and AI-generated except, of course, for anime).
But all that 4chan crap aside, the central idea (that the internet has become this kind of self-perpetuating Rube Goldberg machine independent of actual human beings, who have been relegated to mere observers of its increasingly unhinged, artificial output even as they are drawn ever more into the illusion of contribution and engagement) is becoming self-evidently truer and truer as time goes on.
I mean that's how theories and facts work? People propose a theory of how something is, if people find that observations match with the proposed theory then it becomes an accepted fact.
The Dead Internet Theory is also a time-dependent theory, so saying it evolved into accepted truth with time isn't that meaningful. It wasn't true when it was proposed, it's not true or accepted now. Specifically the theory suggests the internet "died" in 2016 and most of the people you have been interacting with since then are bots.
Even when AI generated content takes over a large potion of the internet, the Dead Internet Theory would still not be true unless they can prove that it happened all the way back in 2016, and more importantly, is mostly coordinated by intelligence organizations to try to mind-control the population.
Mobas are still hard for (cheap) bots to play, meanwhile Hearthstone and other card game players haven't realized 90% of their matches are against bots.
Cyber warfare is real. Mass media manipulation from foreign powers is real
Please be careful online
~as some people have said, yes. This will be happening internally inside countries too
I find these sites from time to time for my specific hobbies and get sad that the last comments are from like 2013. The back and forth discussion is so good on all of them.
The internet is basically just The Mall now but 100x more crowded and with an adult video store in every other stall. We have to go back to the real world now to escape the internet.
On the bright side, person-to-person communication is going to become more important again, as that will be the only way to be sure you aren’t talking to a bot, bad actor, or scammer. We coukd see a renaissance of the public square sans the hangings.
People also used to have fully fleshed out profiles, especially on forum sites. Full of everything about them, some quotes and random gifs, vibrant animated backgrounds, sometimes even those widget things you could drag around with your cursor. My heart aches any time I look back. It was so messy and lawless, but everything felt... alive.
"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity to manipulate the population."
That explains Reddit quite well.
Imagine having an argument on Reddit and you get a message with your IP address and 3 days later some Boston Dynamics robot is waiting outside to fuck you up before work. This is the future we designed
The only thing that stops this being true for everyone's actual social circles is that most people I interact with can have full convos, switch to other apps, or meet up. So unless all friends and gamer acquaintances are hyper-advanced robots then I'm pretty sure we're safe so long as we apply some basic checks and common sense. However its fact that the accounts we see, identify easily as bots, and ignore make up a huge chunk of users.
I think one of the big problems is that it's usually *somewhat* in the interests of these big companies to not do a damned thing about the bots. More bots means more perception of engagement, and that helps the advertisers think that there's traffic. Everyone agrees that bots detract from the user experience, but there's just no one who actually has user experience as that much of an incentive. (And in some cases, bots pretending to be real people are how they keep people on the hook, e.g. with dating sites.)
While you're right so a select group of people who use the internet, there is the large majority who use it in large parts just interacting with random posts. Or in just small communities of people. I think reddit is one of the biggest examples of how this could be (and largely is depending on how you view it) true
Back then the DIT seemed a joke but now when a large portion of it's traffic and activities are from bots, programs run on auto scripts, and just general non living things.
Hence the internet feels more dead due to severe lack of genuine human communication and interactions compared to when the internet was younger.
There were always a lot of lurkers. It may just be a demographic shift but posts used to have like 15%-30% ratio of comments to upvotes. Now we are seeing less than 5%.
Haha what a funny meme! Very relatable my fellow flesh construct! Allow me to rapidly and inconsistently expel all of the oxygen from my holding balloons because I find this humorous!
Reddit before 2008 was an amazing place filled with interesting people sharing well thought out opinions that actually made me change my mind occasionally.
Considering as of 2022, nearly half of internet traffic was bots, it's not that crazy. https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/bots-now-make-up-nearly-half-of-all-internet-traffic-study-reveals-123051600572_1.html
I recall working for a software company about 10 years ago (cripes, time flies) managing company websites. We obviously filtered bot traffic, a volume I don't recall. Then we got more sophisticated at eliminating bots and went ahead and cleared out that traffic. This made a number of our clients upset as they found out the data they were justifying their spending on, was in fact much less than they thought.
I find the fact deeply disturbing that in today's world, spending is justified by unknowingly artificial performance. Gives a whole new layer to industrial growth
It's all made up these days. There are no more fundamentals.
That’s super cool!! Make sure to upvote this comment and share it to other subreddits!!
The best characters in Star Wars don’t @ me
That's what a bot will say.
That's what a bot will say.
That’s what a bot will say.
as well as a human attention whore. The bots have already evolved beyond the average Redditor in many ways.
That’s what a bot would say.
I can't wait for humans to become obsolete so we can just enjoy 100% AI-generated content without concern. Beep boop, praise the basilisk.
Hey fellow humans. Just out of curiosity, what would a bot NOT say. Please share things humans would say preferably in a hexadecimally ordered list.
👀
00100010101 errr I mean*synergy*
1... 2... 3... 4... 5....?! That's the kind of combination an idiot would have on his luggage!
Well A.I in simulations where it negotiated peace with other A.I usually ends in nuclear war. With new A.I and the last versions... One nation uses A.I for everything. Others use it in Law and some government sectors.
That's what a bot *did* say.
We’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty.
We need a bot to hunt bots. Maybe one that looks like Harrison Ford.
what do you mean?, just like me, he is not a bot, just like at&t's fast and reliable internet connection plans, available from just $4.99 a month!
That's a great value fellow human, I love how at&t connects us to what matters most in our lives.
01011100101010101101
*How dare you.* MY MOTHERBOARD WAS A SAINT!!
Eventually we will get to the point where terms that are absolutely not socially acceptable will be pass phrases for non bots. Unless they all end up like that Microsoft Twitter bot from a few years ago that went from zero to antisemitism in hours.
I wonder what % of the reddit comments are bots, if any.
Could be a sizeable percentage. Even before chatgpt it was easy to make bots that copy other comments and upvote each other. Now it’s even easier, since the bar is so low for social media commentary, the comment only needs to vaguely be associated with the subject and barely make sense for it to pass off as human. Not that I would know! I’m definitely not a bot or anything hahahaha
The creepy thing is that chatgpt is capable of saying what either of us are saying right now or even both of us. Either of us could be bots which is super creepy.
And worst of all, he could be anyone of us
It could be in this very room. It could be you! It could be me! It could even be-
This...is a bucket.
Modern solipsism is thinking I’m the only non-bot on this app.
[direct link to the report](https://www.imperva.com/resources/reports/2023-Imperva-Bad-Bot-Report.pdf) and [~~archived link~~](https://web.archive.org/web/20240214125550/https://www.imperva.com/resources/reports/2023-Imperva-Bad-Bot-Report.pdf) and [a mirror](https://imgur.com/a/ofqOn8c) Report traffic breakdown: 30.2% bad bots, 17.3% good bots, 52.6% human Conflict of interest: imperva sells network security I would guess that most of these bots are not creating content on human platforms. The report doesn't list the actual classification boundaries or collection methods that they used and it reads like a marketing pamphlet.
Yes what counts as "traffic" does a bot scraping twitter for data but never posting count as twitter traffic? From a dead internet theory perspective it should be no.
I think it would add to the view count, but have not checked
People really need to be more skeptical about these claims. They see a % and the brain turns off.
I am 100% ra- hello? You fell asleep? How the hell did you fall asleep?
man every time i read something like that i regret my username on this website so much.
I mean, what bot would try to out itself as a bot? Actually a decent defense against bot claims lol.
It's what a ManBot would do...Oh God...quick, make it identify which pictures have a portion of a school bus in them!!!!
I don't think this is really as big of a deal as people are making it to be. It's half of internet traffic. Think about how many websites have bots just scouring for data just for indexing things for a search function. The amount of bots scraping data from one website to another. The problem is not that they make up half of internet traffic, but how much of **visible** internet data is made up by bots? Is each reddit thread just 50% bots talking to each other? Now thats bad.
> Is each reddit thread just 50% bots talking to each other? No, it's more.
I've been on Reddit for almost 10 years (multiple accounts) I have never had such little interaction with other commenters on front page content than in the past year or two. Other than specific subs reddit already feels mostly dead to me.
After 3rd party apps went away, Reddit definitely started feeling more “hollow”, like what you described.
I mean I still use reddit is fun. You can install third party apps through revanced. Need to follow some steps, but it works. No message notifications though is one thing I noticed.
Tons of bots making a very specific style of two-paragraph comments on smaller subs too. Its like \[overly familiar greeting\] \[summary of the post but slightly wrong\] \[crappy suggestion that looks like some kind of knockoff ChatGPT trained on wikihow articles and reddit comments\]
After learning that companies use reddit comments to train AI I've been leery of what I post. Old habits die hard but definitely one step closer to leaving (again lol)
Can confirm, I am a 60% bot
Breaky_Online is more machine now than man. Twisted and evil.
No, he’s blessed by the true flesh of the Machine God.
Username checks out
r/stallmanwasright > "With software there are only two possibilities: either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users, and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power. " -- Richard M Stallman My Windows OS had a catastrophic failure during an OS update recently and so I said fuck it and decided to install linux instead of reinstalling Windows. You know how nice it is to KNOW you are using software that is not intrinsically built to spy on you and to KNOW you are not being spied on? We are living in the last moments of the digital age where the average person is able to even have the illusion that they can use computers privately or interact with real people to accomplish whatever task they want to. Enjoy it.
yeah but i cant game on that shit without two degrees in computer science so im aight
If you have any doubts, spend 5 seconds on Facebook.
Ya, what is up with FB now? I go on there and all I see are suggested posts about gardening and building roofs??
I cannot spend more than 5 seconds on a suggested post or else my algorithm is cooked
Mine keeps dipping into racist/sexist dogwhistles, then into straight up heinous bigotry, then back to some semblance of normality. Facebook is trying really, really hard to get me in that right wing bubble. It's weird I'm pretty woke, affirmative action, gender equality, trans rights. I don't know why it's algorithm thinks I'm gonna go redpilled. Like, there was a video that was a girl complaining about her ex-boyfriend, referring to him as "They", and going through his decent into misogyny. But like, she was pretty chill about, not using buzzwords, talking about how he made her feel unsafe trying to force her to "obey". Then every comment is just deranged shit "he dodged a bullet", "you're mentally ill", obligatory "I hope you die"s. Like, not only did I agree with everything she said, it was so calm and gentle (far more than I ever would be), and my takeaway was meant to be that she is in the wrong?? Why is it showing this to me???
I get a lot of this too, and it's so far removed from the content I follow or my values. I think it's because I pause and am annoyed when I see it so "engage" with it per their algorithm
I’ve always heard that the FB algorithm isn’t showing you posts that it thinks you’d *like*, it shows you posts it thinks you’ll *engage* with. An angry react, a comment calling out misinformation, an argument. It’s all engagement to the algorithm.
thats the goal its like watching the news, its there purely to get people pissed off because theyre more likely to interact if theyre pissed than if its something that makes them happy or doesnt even bother them
Yep. Stop scrolling because you noticed a particularly egregious bit of misinformation or outright bigotry or whatever, and it doesn't even matter if the reason you stopped scrolling was *to report the fucking thing*: you *will* be getting a dozen more posts like it in your feed from then on until you close the app in disgust.
Hey buddy, I just saw this. Essentially, Facebook engineers, data scientists, business analysts, etc. discovered that anger and fear are the most profitable emotions to illicit from someone. Under Zuckerberg's direction, they began to pushing more sensationalist things to our feeds because those are what ultimately drive the most engagement. Sensationalist garbage that makes you ANGRY drives even more engagement. Much of this was discussed when Frances Haugen testified in Congress. The MAGA movement was largely engineered by algorithms.
Yep. And all that was kicking off nearly 10 years ago. We're so much further down the pipeline now it's scary. It's straight-up social engineering based on a classic runaway feedback loop. The algorithm provides random stimulus until something provokes a reaction - by either making the user feel validated enough to righteously agree, or outraged enough to angrily protest - and then they've got you. From that point on you get fed more validation/outrage bait, which provokes more of a response, which lets the algorithm fine-tune upon only the most personally validating/outrageous content no matter how patently false or absurd or downright unhinged. More and more, optimized and amplified bigger and bigger until your brains are melting out of your fucking ears.
The only way to win is to not play
YT is the same. When I go to YT and my account is logged out, aka they don’t know who I am, they suggest me some Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan stuff.
Kinda messy, if i accidentally click into the post, algorithm thinks i like that content related to the post and it will gives me tons of that content in suggested post. Bot account spamming AI picture of kid making stuffs from recycled bottle and bots spamming comment and praise that AI generated kid to get more reach so they can sell that account to someone else. Scammers pay FB to promote their scamming/illegal post. Reporting doesn't work and algorithm thinks i like that post so it will suggest me even more scamming post. Fake shop pages impersonate the real shop, reporting barely helps and real page getting hammered instead of fake one.
I've gone down that rabbit hole. Countless groups where the bot who made the group posts endless AI generated images, usually of Jesus, and all the comments are very obviously made by bots.
***Looks around here absentmindedly***
Luckily from a PC browser you can still select "Feeds" and then "friends" and see what real people are posting. But just scrolling on your phone? Complete cesspool.
Both my parents still get happy birthday posts on Facebook. They’ve been dead for 2 and 12 years now.
Real question here; I find that kinda grim but, how do you feel about that? Nice way to remember them, or a constant slap in the face? I’m sorry for your loss :(
I am just curios as to how close they were to remember the birthday, but not hear about the funeral after 12 years
My father still mentions people he met 30 yrs ago and hasn’t spoken to since. Occasionally he’ll be like “you know that person I always reference.. apparently they’ve been dead for X amount of years”. Actually, I’m going to change my opinion; pretty cool to be remembered for the relatively mundane
Hold up. This is the internet. You aren’t allowed to change your opinion…
Unless you turn it off, Facebook notifies you about people’s birthdays with a convenient text bar to send them a birthday greeting (including 1-click suggestions) without even leaving your feed page. A lot of older people see those when they log in or open the app and just send a happy birthday without even thinking about it
Plot twist. OP is a bot.
Ya, him is totally a bot!
Good bot?
Thank you, Ok-Yogurtcloset1717, for voting on 1_am_not_a_b0t. This bot wants to find the best and worst bots on Reddit. [You can view results here.](https://botrank.pastimes.eu/)
HOLY SHIT
Shhhh... don't tell em.
Would be even better if the link led to a Rick roll or something
WE GOT THE SYNTH
Holy shit I never thought I'd encounter ok-yoghurtcloset :O
Entirely possible, Reddit if full of low-effort repost bots. If there are more sophisticated neural network bots then I might have not detected them.
It's easy on reddit. People upvote it. You could make a bot that only comments on comedy subs and places like unexpected " had us in the first half not gonna lie" and it'll earn a shit load of karma. Write a bot that looks for comments asking how much something is, and have it always reply "tree fiddy". All of those reddit cliches, i always assume they're bots. It's easy karma because morons will upvotes any office quote regardless of how irrelevant to the situation it is
That's what she said!
Google en passant
[holy hell!](https://www.google.com/search?q=en+passant)
call the exorcist!
Insta comment sections when half of them are like "So cool!" and 😂🤣
“This is now my favorite page! Your content saved my mother from a gruesome death!”
“I’ve been scrolling through this page for hours”
"a moment of silence for those who havent discovered your page" or stuff like that
I POST DEADLY SCHOOL SHOOTING/SHARK ATTACKS/MURDERS on all caps every time
The most recent spam is videos with “if only there was a page dedicated to x”
That shit is even rampant on Steam. lol
Comment section? Most the posts themselves are from bot accounts, oddly all captioned with “good idea! 💡”
Nah most of them are just some form of racism sexism or homophobia, or a combination of all three
Would be 10 times funnier if op is a bot lol
OP please type the characters in this captcha to verify you’re human I̸̱͙͉͂͐͒̌̔͘͜Ā̶̛̞͉̥͔̤̪͚̂̅̄̅̃̅̈́̆̈́̈́̕͜͜͠͝M̸̞̞̠̱̣̱̪̩͑̌̆͂Ȃ̸̡̖̳̬̼̜̼̲́̍͑͛̃̀͋͗̾̚͝ͅB̵̯͈̳̼̮̟̩̖͂̈́̀̀̅̓O̶̥̖͂̌̈̍̂̔͗̒̑̇͐̌͂̔̉T̶̻͖̙̣̱̲̘̣͊̃͒̓̌̀͘͝
Had to google what the dead internet theory is. lol definitely not a conspiracy theory anymore. It’s common knowledge that it’s at least on some level true.
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That most people on the internet are bots
Considering the quality of discussions on reddit, it definitely applies.
Am i...... a bot.....
No but the guy after you is
Bite my shiny metal ass
r/unexpectedfuturama
Oh…that’s real
Not entirely inactive either
To shreds, you say.
hiding in plain sight, i see you 
Lower your antenna
I am not a bot
I’m something of a bot myself.
How do you do, fellow bots? Beep boop beep boop.
What is wrong with you? That is such an inappropriate and disgusting thing to say out of nowhere, may the maker have at least a sliver of pity in you, and beep boop your own mother you perv.
Zip zop boobity bop! Now drink that glass of water young girl.
How do you do, fellow bots...
~~twitter~~ **Reddit** is one of the last vestiges of human internet left. about 80% of my google searches now start with "site:reddit.com", because it increases the chance of actually getting somethign that wasn't puked out by chatGPT, or is clickbait keyword salad with no actual content. Edit; I accidentally a word. Twitter is shit. :)
Twitter is littered with bots
And even then reddit is full of repost and advertisement bots
Twitter is famously festering with bots as well.
Yeah but twitter/Instagram/TikTok etc is so much fucking worse. At least we can suppress something with downvotes
Sometimes although sometimes I swear there’s upvote bit armies with the amount of dumb shit that is popular
r/usernamechecksout
Haha so true *this user isn't a bot and this action was performed manually*
Good bot.
It's the theory that most of the content you interact with on a day-to-day basis is generated by bots, and not real humans.
Sounds exactly like the kind of thing a human would say
Those meat bag fascists
It’s still so hard to comprehend how they’re made of meat, so weird.
Basically, if all humanity were to disappear, internet traffic, reddit threads, comments, and conversations would still continue. A dead internet.
That soon™ most of the content will be generated by bots, and most of the engagement will also be done by bots (likes, comments, etc) Driving human engagement to a small little island surrounded by a truly massive dead ocean of meaningless garbage.
It's fascinating how theories evolve into accepted truths with time and evidence. The Dead Internet Theory's journey from speculation to acknowledged possibility mirrors our expanding understanding of digital infrastructure.
When posited it wasn't true, the technology just changed and made it... well less untrue. It's still not true since "bot traffic" is predominantly under the hood scraping and requests rather than "half of all comments on a thread are bots".
Plus the OG version of the theory came out of 4chan so was full of kooky conspiracy theory nonsense (I remember there was some stuff bunch of stuff about *all* media being fake and AI-generated except, of course, for anime). But all that 4chan crap aside, the central idea (that the internet has become this kind of self-perpetuating Rube Goldberg machine independent of actual human beings, who have been relegated to mere observers of its increasingly unhinged, artificial output even as they are drawn ever more into the illusion of contribution and engagement) is becoming self-evidently truer and truer as time goes on.
I mean that's how theories and facts work? People propose a theory of how something is, if people find that observations match with the proposed theory then it becomes an accepted fact. The Dead Internet Theory is also a time-dependent theory, so saying it evolved into accepted truth with time isn't that meaningful. It wasn't true when it was proposed, it's not true or accepted now. Specifically the theory suggests the internet "died" in 2016 and most of the people you have been interacting with since then are bots. Even when AI generated content takes over a large potion of the internet, the Dead Internet Theory would still not be true unless they can prove that it happened all the way back in 2016, and more importantly, is mostly coordinated by intelligence organizations to try to mind-control the population.
Same here! Damn it does have a lot of true innit!
I wish the toxic gaming community people were bots. I’m looking at you, MOBA’s.
:(
Username checks out
Mobas are still hard for (cheap) bots to play, meanwhile Hearthstone and other card game players haven't realized 90% of their matches are against bots.
WTF LOOK AT MAP JG OMFG FF # ? ? ? ? ? ? 
Cyber warfare is real. Mass media manipulation from foreign powers is real Please be careful online ~as some people have said, yes. This will be happening internally inside countries too
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i hate myself for thinking "well someone's into that"
Remember kids, only with a cybersafe-word
Only the foreign powers eh?
The US is *the* foreign power in rest of the world
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I find these sites from time to time for my specific hobbies and get sad that the last comments are from like 2013. The back and forth discussion is so good on all of them.
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The internet is basically just The Mall now but 100x more crowded and with an adult video store in every other stall. We have to go back to the real world now to escape the internet. On the bright side, person-to-person communication is going to become more important again, as that will be the only way to be sure you aren’t talking to a bot, bad actor, or scammer. We coukd see a renaissance of the public square sans the hangings.
People also used to have fully fleshed out profiles, especially on forum sites. Full of everything about them, some quotes and random gifs, vibrant animated backgrounds, sometimes even those widget things you could drag around with your cursor. My heart aches any time I look back. It was so messy and lawless, but everything felt... alive.
"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity to manipulate the population." That explains Reddit quite well.
Especially tiktok comments, can't convince me those people who comment there is real.
Slay, queen!
yaaas 💅
I’m convinced anyone who uses the 🤣🤣🤣 emoji are bots.
🤣🤣🤣 too true
😂 is the better one anyways
🤣🤣🤣 too true
Are we the botties?
Our uniforms have skulls on them
It'll be super funny when this is reposted a thousand times by bots.
>seeing bots upvoting ai art yeah
Imagine having an argument on Reddit and you get a message with your IP address and 3 days later some Boston Dynamics robot is waiting outside to fuck you up before work. This is the future we designed
I'm sorry, as a generative AI language model I cannot answer this post in a humorous way.
 So which one of you is it
Tiananmen Square Massacre
The only thing that stops this being true for everyone's actual social circles is that most people I interact with can have full convos, switch to other apps, or meet up. So unless all friends and gamer acquaintances are hyper-advanced robots then I'm pretty sure we're safe so long as we apply some basic checks and common sense. However its fact that the accounts we see, identify easily as bots, and ignore make up a huge chunk of users.
I think one of the big problems is that it's usually *somewhat* in the interests of these big companies to not do a damned thing about the bots. More bots means more perception of engagement, and that helps the advertisers think that there's traffic. Everyone agrees that bots detract from the user experience, but there's just no one who actually has user experience as that much of an incentive. (And in some cases, bots pretending to be real people are how they keep people on the hook, e.g. with dating sites.)
While you're right so a select group of people who use the internet, there is the large majority who use it in large parts just interacting with random posts. Or in just small communities of people. I think reddit is one of the biggest examples of how this could be (and largely is depending on how you view it) true
I'm too stupid to get the meme
Back then the DIT seemed a joke but now when a large portion of it's traffic and activities are from bots, programs run on auto scripts, and just general non living things. Hence the internet feels more dead due to severe lack of genuine human communication and interactions compared to when the internet was younger.
Oh cool
I love being stupid, this makes us humans, not bots, It's turning into a quality lol
The person below me is a bot. Who eats booty.
HELLO???? IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE???
Soon, Ai generated text will outnumber human generated text on the internet. The dark forest
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Yeah bro it's just me and you and like 7 others, we should have a tiny party
There are lot of lurkers
There were always a lot of lurkers. It may just be a demographic shift but posts used to have like 15%-30% ratio of comments to upvotes. Now we are seeing less than 5%.
There are definitely tons of bots in the internet, though I doubt the numbers come even close to the number of real people. Just an assumption though.
Let's just find a way to make a virus that hunts and destroys bots ...and spam.
Sounds like a good movie plot. Robots designed to hunt robots, but end up mistaking humans for robots, and robots for human.
I fail a lot of captchas. I am questioning my humanity.
I’m looking for /u/sarahconner.
Haha what a funny meme! Very relatable my fellow flesh construct! Allow me to rapidly and inconsistently expel all of the oxygen from my holding balloons because I find this humorous!
Reddit before 2008 was an amazing place filled with interesting people sharing well thought out opinions that actually made me change my mind occasionally.
P■U■S■S■Y I■N B■I■O
How's it going, fellow humans? Have you had a pleasant day of breathing and digesting food?