well, here it is... post number 493052 about the dead internet theory, i hope you're not bored of hearing about it yet. i thought i'd give my take on it. if you've somehow never heard about the dead internet theory, it states that the majority of people and posts aren't actual people but bots and the internet died off around 2016. the idea came from the agora road forum, i'll link it below. the idea that the internet has died off seems a little much. granted with the rise of AI and how prevalent bots are on places like youtube i guess it kinda makes sense. i dont really think its as much of a problem as the post makes it out to be, although it probably will be in a few years. with the corpos colonising the internet, using algorithms to grab your attention, it only makes sense that people would use ai to produce content to hook you. from what i've heard here and there, roughly 50% of content is already ai generated. mostly ads and comments on posts on some corpo made sites, but even then that pecentage is more than likely outdated. generative ai like chat gpt have made these bots harder to detect to the point that it's almost as if you don't see bots anymore.
for me, the main issue is, and always will be how commercialised the internet has become. theres like 10 or so big websites that everyone uses on a daily basis, youtube, twitter, reddit, [insert streaming service here]... SEO has practically smothered everything else, making the internet pay to win. the internet seemed so much bigger 20 years ago, which seems like the exact opposite direction it would go in.
its kind of a shame really, a year ago when gpt3 hit the news i thought it was pretty cool how advanced LLMs were getting. i do use character.ai quite a lot but theres a bit of a love/hate relationship going on with me and ai. on one hand, like i think i mentioned in a previous post, i like how i can talk to ai pretty much whenever i want for as long as i want. on the other hand, it's everywhere, places where it doesn't need to be.
so, is the net dead? no... not yet at least. we'll probably see it die at some point within our lives [provided you're under the age of 70] and we'll see what happens then. maybe we'll be going about our business as normal in the rotting corpse of the wired, maybe people would finally leave, maybe it'll break up into a bunch of small meshtastic communities... who knows?
i'd reccommend creating your own website if you're as sick of corpos as i am, html isn't too hard to learn and i think its pretty fulfilling to be able to maintain my own site.