Subj : THE INTERNET AT LARGE, IS DEAD
To   : All
From : nethius
Date : Tue May 16 2023 15:12:08

What has the internet become?

Years ago the internet was filled with an incredible assortment of small pages maintained by dedicated people. The BBS was common, people had conversations, and ads and censorship were few and far between. 

But things changed, a lot.                                                   
                                                                              
The internet itself has changed. 

AOL, GeoCities, Yahoo, Ask, Britannica, untold numbers of BBS, IRC, and instant messengers were everywhere. But, over time a consoldation happened. In the mid-2000's we saw the rise of yahoo! and Google, GeoCities disappeared, myspace came along, an Amazon entered the limelight. 

Suddenly, the vast library of webrings, specialized websites, and personally maintained webpages began to fade away to nothing. When facebook and YouTube came along, they quickly stole the show and became the top visited websites. Now the majority of the internet feels small, constricted by several major corporations Alphabet (youtube, google, waze, nest, fitbit), Meta (facebook, Instagram),  Amazon (amazon, twitch), and Microsoft (msn, linkdin, bing). 

Top of the charts for the newly condensed internet are youtube, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. According to Pew research the majority of individuals in the USA frequent Youtube and Facebook the most use. These websites are generally designed to drive ad-revenue and rely on the content created by users for most of what's found on them. 

But the rest of the internet is something entirely different, it's a web of illusion and deceit designed to keep us trapped in a loop of scrolling and clicking through content that just feels, "off" in a lot of cases. Then there's the verifiably fake side of everything, Click farms, bot nets, automated systems, AI generated content, deepfakes, fake debates with bots, fake comments, and fake engagement. The numbers vary, but estimates frequently indicate over half of all traffic on the internet is now non-human. 

It's been dismissed over and over by media and reporters, but the Dead Internet Theory is very plausible. 

What is the dead internet theory? It is a conspiracy theory (lol) that claims that most of the content on the internet today is generated by artificial intelligence, and not by real people. The theory argues that the internet "died" around 2016 or 2017, when bot activity and algorithmic curation became dominant, reducing human interaction and creativity. The theory is based on anecdotal evidence, such as repetitive tweets, suspicious YouTube views, and low-quality websites. 

It's hard to find proof that the internet is dead or that AI has taken over, mostly because it's the same articles and posts over and over. Sometimes I wonder if I believe in it because of some sense of nostalgia, or if I'm tired of the condensed and corralled nature of how the internet feels these days.

I'm happy to discover the BBS systems are still around, at least here there's some real people to interact with.

I'll close with a haiku by GPT-4. 

The web is alive
But we only see shadows
Of what once was real

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/07/15 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: thE qUAntUm wOrmhOlE, rAmsgAtE, uK. bbs.erb.pw (700:100/37)

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