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.
Everyday we do not stop the profit incentive.
When we developed culture, it began the uncoupling of our abilities from the capacity of our brains. All other problems stem from this!
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 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.
For whom are they purchasing things?
Their techno fascist overlords, not for consumption, just to keep the propaganda space up so their have a space to control the narrative.
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.
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.
I think people will eventually have to get used to paying for things though, if bots / AI / ad blockers kill off the feasibility of online advertising. Either that or everything becoming a freemium service with major limits for free users.
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.
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.
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.
You mean this with /s right? Cause AI is burning lots of dead dinosaurs. More than snailp mail I’d wager but I didn’t do the math.
Snail mail is delivered by guys in trucks / jeeps - sometimes on foot, still lots of fuel to carry around all that glossy printed (mostly uneconomical to recycle) paper. Per unit-information carried, snail mail has enormously higher environmental impact.
Now, if you feel special enough to think you have your own personal LLM agents targeting you with web advertising… maybe that’s costing the same as your share of sending the mail truck around to you - but I don’t think the internet marketers are quite there with burning the tokens just to try to hit you, personally, with offers you can’t refuse. Mostly you’re just a statistic in the bigger algorithms that fill your feed from troughs A, R and X.
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
We will have private mesh nets
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.
Well, users for users. There was a co-op teleoperator iirc.
Overlay networks are also feasable.
You mean the Web.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Add to these “very rare moments” every single time I use the FOSS, offline speech-to-text engines handy.computer and Whisper+. They’re awesome, down to the automatic punctuation!
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.
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.
The things that have “gone to Facebook or Reddit” mostly didn’t exist before Facebook and Reddit.
And you wonder why the mega corps want you to give your ID for accessing the internet. Then they can tie your traffic as an actual human and generate ad monies.
So you’re saying pretending to be AI will be the new adblock?
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
You ever see that movie, Idiocracy? They cloned a clone and it was retarded. Bots copying bots copying bots will eventually turn to shit that’s hard to decipher and obviously written by bots.
already there mate.
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
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.
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?
So I can install any software I want. I’m running my own Lemmy server. I host Odoo and n8n for my wife’s business. I have servers running Borgbackup and Borgmatic for backups. And a bunch of other stuff.
I used to pay $10 per month for my “minimal hosting” - that inflated to nearly $15 across the decades. Then I switched to a modern host provider, now my bills are $0.02 per month for the exact same functionality that used to cost a minimum of $10.
Which modern host provider did you switch to?
cloudflare
Hope these bots are paying customers, then.
They all go back to people.
If most of them are on billionaires’ payrolls in some way, they can probably afford more than all the normies.
Yay, more trash for the trash heap. We’re burning through resources egregiously, even before bots.
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?
You mean Twitter?
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)
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.
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.
On the flip side, a bunch of services / web apps (mostly paid ones) are adding APIs to become “AI native”… but you can use those APIs without having to use AI too.
