I don't think everyone is fake and a bot, I think it's that the internet has been completely sterilized for mass consumerism and marketing. There are four websites and we all visit them in loops.

For me the internet I knew died around 2010 thanks to normie masses.

How can there be few real users when the masses are online 24/7? Agree with >>134680 tho. It was good knowing the internet pre 2010

not the full internet, but outside social media…. yeah, in a 50/50 way.
i mean, now every time i try to google anything 90% of the pages are ai-generated content, paid advertising or sites designated to be on top results no matter what you search.
honestly killing stuff like forums and the small web was what killed the interned imo, social media is pretty much an advertising n spyware disguised as communication platforms at this point, i dont know how ppl manage to use them on app, without an ad-clock… (and even blocking the ads, all influencers or whatever do is to advertise to you in a direct or indirect way)
so yeah, are there tons of real people out there? yes
do real people still outnumber bots & similar? also yes
but as >>134678 said, everything is marketing now, i dont think it will hit social media as hard, but if google is mostly ai stuff now, i think everything will keep going downhill

It feels like the distance between people and online communities grew so far that they cannot see each other anymore. Places like this feel like islands of life separated by vast reaches of dead sterile desert, like those hydrothermal vent habitats on the sea floor.

>>134668
there already is a thread for this on /x/ >>>/x/3648 (i hope it will work i always forget how to crossboard reply)

There's no way. It died sometime in 2007. And if you can't remember the internet from 1998-2003… God that's depressing. Tbf that internet died in like 2005. Wild west internet was the best internet.

>>134668
>the Internet as we know it actually died sometime between 2016 and 2017
I don't think it died, I think there just was never that much of it to begin with. I remember trying to google outfits from well known movies back in 2004 and getting zero hits. Things are better now thanks to social media but outside of that a lot of it is auto generated stuff.

>>134729
Forgot to add, even now the internet is a lot smaller than people think. If you look at it as a whole, it is huge but if you pick a specific interest, it becomes a lot smaller. It's not hard to dox someone from very little information because of this.

>>134730
Not if you don't use social media

>>134668
The theory is right in regards to how there are a lot of bots because companies and influencers benefit from fake reviews, comments, and likes. I don't want to blame the sterilization of the internet on just marketing and commercialization because then that completely ignores how internet culture changes because of respectability politics. Reddit used to be quite offensive, people casually used slurs, and were very aggressive about topics related to social justice but then overtime redditors started peppering the same lingo used on tumblr. I think during 2016 and 2017 tumblr's culture spread to different websites and Trump's definitely accelerated it.
The theory also neglects that more and more people around the world are using the internet whether because of improved internet access hence why "oh no there are so many normies now!" is such a common statement I feel like it's very narcissistic and self-centered.

>>134668
>most of the internet is algorithms, bots and AI generating content, replies and giving each other traffic, with very few real users in between.
This is a bit of an open secret. People who works on large websites(Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc.) are keenly aware of this. That YouTube vid links to a guy who goes into it specifically for a few different sites. Also check out Renee Diresta who also talks about this a lot.

>>137502
interesting stuff, thanks