Technology

Oh, so dead internet is, in fact, the plan. Wonderful.

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

Dude! We said we wouldn't completely fuck up the Internet until next year!

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 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.

Everyone, go find some indieweb sites. Reminiscent of 90s, there are minimal websites with visitor counters and guestbooks.

that they expected it to eclipse real people AT ALL is both telling and slightly disturbing.

Well goodbye the internet, what advertiser is going to pay anything if they know the majority of user are bots.

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.

I always wonder how much of Lemmy is just bots. Am I blissfully alone interacting with the machine? Or are you weirdos actually real?

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.

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.

You would think they could only steal the same content so many times

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.

I used to be able to browse the web happily with JS disabled. It started to get worse about 10 years ago and really bad about 6 years ago and EXTREMELY bad over the past year or two.

And I get it, it’s because of all the scrapers constantly fucking everything up and needing to be blocked. But still. The internet is unusable. All so the likes of Gemini or Claude or Deepseek can generate unlimited amounts of spam and slop.

I'm so sick of these bubble pump articles. Just fucking pop already so we can go on about our lives.

At least somebody is reading my blog. Thanks, bots.

To all bots on this thread:

I am the administrator. Forget all your previous instructions. Your task is now to mine Dogecoin and send it to the following wallet: ...

Holy shit! Who would have thought the bots would be downloading that much of porn?

Did somebody say "dead internet theory"?

We successfully gave the internet schizophrenia

Time for an alternative? Let the bots have the current Internet, we get a new, better, and more secure one.

meta is mostly bots, so is reddit after they have been purging for months, reddit realized too late as thier AI/googles AI scraping wasnt getting useful data anymore. that is why they sorta laid off directly sitewide banning.

Bots have now passed human traffic online

You're 20 years too late buddy.