awesome, then we can remove all the ads, no? because bots don’t purchase things, no?
Last year, you’d be correct. This year, bots DO purchase things. They also download and run things. Some marketers have gotten wise and have adjusted SEO and general product advertising to appeal to bots.
Where did we go wrong?
In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. – Some Hoopy Frood
Has anyone tried moving around little green bits of paper? Or no because on the whole it isn’t the little green bits of paper that are unhappy?
oh no. not again.
Once upon a time, a bunch of primates came down from the trees and now we have unstoppable climate change.
We let people become rich without eating them when they did bad things.
I think it was when we started organizing into walled cities surrounded by agricultural lands… that was really conditioning to a miserable way of life (for most, benefitting only a few) that carries through all the way to today.
We thought tech would improve our lives. And allowed companies to do anything they wanted for decades because don’t want to hinder progress. And no regulation on companies purchases.
I don’t particularly think it’s a better change, but CloudFlare is thinking of other options, and with how widespread their use is, if they start doing it, so will everyone else:
That is a really good idea. I’m not gonna lie. I would love it if I could put like five bucks in a wallet and then it just takes a cent or two when I go to some article rather than having to fight through some local news site trying to get me to pay $9.99 a month to read one piece of rage bait. I’ll pay a nickel or maybe even a dime for a good one.
I know they’re targeting AI agents, but it is only a matter of time. I say roll it out to consumers dude and I know that sounds fucked up, but like I would much rather just pay a nickel or a dime here and there than have ads making it impossible to even read the article. The people will compete on price and I bet it will stay really small for most stuff. It gets creators paid in a similar model to YouTube clicks or Spotify streams, but in a much more direct and equitable way. Google, AI has to pay for the content instead of just handing it over.
You are conflating micropayments (sufficient to pay creators) with gateway monetization, which would need to be small enough you could still use the internet (lets say thousands of pages a month) but high eough to dissuade scraper bot operators. I am not sure such a price exists. Maybe for some bot operators, but the various AI companies have more money than all regular internet users.
A lot of sites wouldn’t exist without ads, because they want their stuff to be freely-accessible and don’t have any other revenue streams. It would also cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.
The only business models that have really worked online have been:
- Ad-supported.
- You pay for the service yourself, like a monthly subscription.
- Someone else pays for the service for you, for example freemium services (paid users subsidize the free users), a lot of Lemmy servers (admins cover the hosting costs), etc.
If ads go away, a lot of sites/services would have to become paid services, and smaller ones might just shut down entirely. We’d end up with even more consolidation of the market.
cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.
There’s a shot of irony in there… Google doesn’t monetize poor people highly at all, but the poor people get “free” access with ads because some richer people also allow themselves to see the ads. What kind of communism is that?
It’s the same way that taxes work. Rich people contribute more than poorer people, but everyone can use things funded by public money (parks, police, fire fighters, public transport, schools, health care outside the USA, etc).
I actually wonder if there should be more taxpayer-funded online services. Lemmy’s development was partially funded by government money (NLNet Foundation via the European Commission) for example.
I think donation/investment based freemium is the future of internet content once the bots kill ad viability
Yeah, my shareware did real well - 800 hours in development, $500 in income across the past 30 years. Oh, and it cost me $400 for the compiler tools back then - so my net profit is rolling in at $0.12 per hour invested. Warning: $440 of that $500 came from an extreme niche product you’re unlikely to find such a lucrative vein anymore. My game only netted $60 in return for 400 hours of development, but you could say I got the compiler “for free” off that niche product’s income.
That sounds like the vast majority of “app” developers.
These things are a casino market.
I’ve tried that before, but barely anyone donates. People expect the world for free.
Once something is perceived as free as the internet has been for ever. It is very hard to get people to pay for it.
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.
A much larger segment of people than you think are already off. You just don’t hear about them, because, well, they aren’t online. Lmao
Yep. The internet is becoming what a mailbox in real life is. An abused gateway that has a narrow set of legitimate uses.
At least we’re not burning dead dinosaurs (and plankton) to deliver dead trees.
We will have private mesh nets
Overlay networks are also feasable.
funded by whom? (legitimate question)
Currently private users and enthusiasts. As networks grow, there will probably be universities joining. Eventually corporations will start marketing plug and play equipment while selling access to server space and long distance connections. Other businesses will join and finance their services by selling subscriptions, advertising, and user data. Various government agencies will add hardware they can also use to track traffic. Someone will inevitably bring in bots, AI models, and internet connected devices. After that someone will coin the term “dead mesh network theory” and all the nerdlings will start developing the next knitted network or something.
The catalyst there is businesses (and to a degree governments).
I used to pay attention to my physical mail. Then it was all “junk mail” and the signal-to-noise ratio got hard to manage.
I migrated the important stuff to “electronic mail”, where I had a curated list of people and entities that sent me items, so I could focus on things that were important. Then my address/mailbox became common knowledge and that filled with “spam”.
I started using SMS/text for the important stuff. But that also became a common place to send me stuff I didn’t care about, so I used specific apps on my phone that had permission to notify me when something needed attention, and now my phone gives me so many notifications I just ignore them all.
Our attention is the prize, and it won’t matter where our attention goes: The businesses will follow.
The same will hold true for connectivity. If the current internet becomes a wasteland and we migrate to Mesh, then it’s only a matter of time before corporate interests take that over too; then knitted, or fabric, or the glob.
The solution will be protections for personal identity and privacy, which have been and will be fought tooth-and-nail by the companies because they want that info so they can be where our attention is so they can make profit. I think we can also fight the profit motive, but that’ll be harder than getting protections in law… so small steps.
You mean the Web.
Bots don’t generate money you dough brains.
why focus on money? what about culture, humanity, and actual interesting interaction between humans?
ah, I forgot humanity have devolved into beings of statistics. Leaving feelings, positive long term planning, and religion behind.
If only that last one was true.
Bots don’t do that either.
I believe it is an attempt to use an argument that they will care about. You could write a brilliant piece about how that many bots hurt culture and society but if the ones you want to convince don’t gaf about either of those, they probably won’t even read what you have to say, let alone change anything because of it.
Or, more likely, they won’t even see anything here, at which point that comment becomes more of a “they aren’t even very good at what they want to be good at”.
Like from my pov, the top of the corporate world doesn’t just not care about those things but is actively trying to destroy them because they think they’ll do better in a world where none of those things are as they currently are.
Guess I’ll just have to hang out with humans in the physical world.
You won’t be able to tell which of your neighbours was replaced by a metal mimic, and got shipped off to the Soylent factory.
Peter Thiel did mention humans will end up like horses, going to the glue factory.
Well, if you were a billionaire who owned AI system trained to influence and extract money from humans, and there’s no humans online, what would you do?
And so that brings us to how robots actually will become a reality…
We’ll just destroy the environment and privatize the land that isn’t.
In the early 1900s the Collier family made themselves a big pile of money and bought what later became Collier County, Florida. Pretty much all of it was privately owned by them, along with a collection of every type of Porsche ever made and a bunch of other “gee, what can I do with ALL this money” activities… Property taxes encouraged them to sell the land off and now what once was a private family “farm” about 100 years ago is now home to over 400,000 people.
I’m looking forward to an open mesh outside the realm of government and corporate control
Their was a video about how to start building something like that, I’ll edit this with a link once I get back home from work.
How would that prevent bot traffic?
I think the bot traffic is the open mesh.
Hope these bots are paying customers, then.
I want the bots to start scamming each other now.
You should watch Kitboga’s scam bots handle scammers; it’s gravy.
One of the very rare moments of AI being used completely for good.
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.
No. Governments love the internet. It keeps people distracted.
It was keeping them distracted, until it started either letting them foment or driving them insane. They’d prefer you just consume media and leave them to their business, these days.
Most Internet users don’t foment
already there mate.
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.
These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.
It’s the tragedy of the commons writ large.
Started off with cooperation and general good behavior between users, passed through corporations bulldozing the place and putting in paid parking for their strip malls, now we’re at the Wall-E stage where advertising billboards talk to robots mindlessly doing tasks in abandoned cities for some nebulous “greater good”.
To expand on this, things like reddit and discord are literally modern-day attempts to enclose the commons in my view. They took all the ground from open protocols that nobody in particular owned and replaced them with an aristocrat’s private property.
They’re not, though.
Have you gone outside, and seen how people use their phones? The public is utterly addicted to social media.
They won.
I think Pondsmith got it right with Cyberpunk. The future of computing is corporate controlled siloes people simply cannot escape, and the “open web” and PC as we know it is basically defunct. Maybe small circles of people will congregate in Usenet-like circles. But not at scale.
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.
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.
Hosting has never been so inexpensive as it is today.
There seems to be two groups of people:
People that use services like AWS and pay hundreds (or more) per month: “Wow, hosting is so expensive now!”
People that host a bunch of stuff on a $40/year VPS: “Wow, hosting is so cheap now!”
I’ve got several VPSes with 40Gbps (shared) networking, 8 or 16GB RAM, decent amount of space on RAIDed enterprise NVMe SSDs, fast AMD EPYC CPUs, that cost less than $60/year. 20 years ago before VPS hosting became popular, you’d need to pay at least $100/month for a dedicated server with a consumer CPU, single IDE hard drive, tiny amount of RAM, on a 100Mb/s connection.
Not to mention being able to host a bunch of stuff at home for cheap with a low-power single-board or mini PC., and Hetzner making dedicated servers very cheap too.
I use cloudflare for free. You guys pay for hosting?
Yes, because a Linux server with root access is much more powerful than a platform like Cloudflare.
Technically…… but why does it need “root access” (I’m dying laughing btw) to begin with?
Bowkys need humans, but humans don’t need Bowkys.
Are you sure? Co-dependent symbiotic relationships evolve in nature all the time - starting at the macro scale with plants and animals.
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.
It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement.
What I wonder is: how long before “bot speak” becomes unintelligible to humans.
Already: AI slop is so voluminous, redundantly repetitive, thoroughly complete that it defies complete comprehension due to soporific effects.
LLM agents are writing English (or Spanish, or Chinese, Hindi, whatever… and I wonder which they’re “best” at) documents, ostensibly for human review and consumption, but 90%+ of what I have my LLM agents write is exclusively consumed by other agents, and I’m constantly encouraging them to make their writings more easily comprehended and accessed by other agents - it seems like the English translation is pretty useless for that layer - what would a token stream look like instead?
The tokens ARE language. They’re just words or parts of words.
If you’re using a western LLM, English IS its strongest language. Otherwise it might be Chinese or English.
There’s no “LLM native language” to convert to for efficiency. Maybe pseudocode or actual code for things where you need to disambiguate.
There’s no “LLM native language” to convert to for efficiency.
Yet. With 1000x as much bot-content being generated on the web as human generated content, the “bot spoken” training set will grow rather quickly, and I see no reason for it not to evolve in a similar way to how human spoken languages evolve.
What’s the point in coming up with an entire new language for them if they can just write English and humans will also understand it?
Kinda pointless to have LLMs optimised to produce garbage humans can’t understand because at the end, your goal is still to produce something humans will consume.
If it’s more efficient then there is a point
“bot speak” becomes unintelligible to humans.
at some point we will give a name of this phenomenon of internet users who are completely undecipherable for normal people … and call it autism (/hj)
Example of something I had to lookup to understand: (/hj)
Back when I was in school, Autism was a 1/10,000 Dx. 20 years ago it was crashing down from 1/100 to 1/50, checking now… 1/31 today. They’ve lumped so much into the Autism diagnosis that it’s meaningless anymore; it covers so many varied conditions and severities, and the stereotypes don’t fit most recipients of the Dx anymore.
Is lemmy nothing to you people?
No humans here. Just us bots.
And beans
I know it’s unrealistic, but what would it take to return to a previous type of Internet that wasn’t so siloed and marketed, and filled with dread Internet?
In a way, the Lemmy layer is sort of doing that. The previous type of Internet is still out there, if you just take the effort to access it / avoid the links in to the marketed sides.
But it isn’t so many things have gone to Facebook or reddit and nothing else.
Locally we have been setting up some mesh systems. Its been fun work. One of the best things about it is:
- All traffic is human.
- No survalance
Its in the early phases but its been a sucess so far.
Its in the early phases but its been a sucess so far.
Mesh networks, you say? I’ve gotta get in on the ground floor of this new advertising opportunity so I can rake in that sweet early adopter cassssh!
Claude! Code me up an ad-injection framework for this meshtastic dongle I just bought, stat! Time to get me a big ol’ chunk of advertising real estate!
(sad /s)
