Technology

Bots don't generate money you dough brains.

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.

I'm looking forward to an open mesh outside the realm of government and corporate control

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

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

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.

I want the bots to start scamming each other now.

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?

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 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 regularly 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.

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.

World governments will be delighted to find that they've driven their populations off of the internet. As much as they'll hate being engaged in 24/7 automated cyber warfare to stop their power plants exploding.

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.

already there mate.

Bowkys need humans, but humans don't need Bowkys.

Hope these bots are paying customers, then.

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.

Well yeah. Of course it would, given the examples they are talking about.

It makes sense right? You have a computer, you can program it to do things. I have programmed mine to scrape data or examine websites, and even in some cases to pull entire directories down.

Now we have an agent do that. In other words a programmed computer tool that is acting on someones behalf using natural language as the question. Note the example given is an AI is looking across as many websites as it can for a review. Or maybe instructions to put something together. Or maybe a list of the highest peaks in the world with the least snowfall. Who knows, but that is endless.

So this "traffic" is still human driven. Its just using a computer to do the work. I think that changes the perspective a little bit. It is all human intention driven.

Also, all traffic by http plus every other request is still human, so that is a bit misleading.

Interestingly, its not like we havent been here before if you look at traffic. The syncing of usenet for a period of time was the largest user of all traffic. So all computer connections, much, much less humans.

Most traffic today is video, then gaming, than music, financial, screen sharing, p2p, and AI makes up a tiny portion. It just is making a huge number of requests for HTTP, but it is growing, and fast.

This is neither pro AI, nor anti AI. I am just trying to examine the landscape instead of the over simplistic headline that really is about Cloudflares business model.