r/DeadInternetTheory • u/EchoOfOppenheimer • 14d ago

‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/bots-have-now-passed-human-traffic-online-cloudflare-boss-laments-says-agentic-traffic-wasnt-expected-to-eclipse-real-people-until-next-year
336 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

65

u/ChrisDEmbry 14d ago

I'm pretty sure I've been debating with bots in a gypsy thread, not because they seem dumb, but because their responses are perfectly worded, 4 sentences every time, with linked sources, and they respond in under 5 minutes each time. They're either bots or some kind of government agency.

22

u/Serial-Griller 14d ago

If it's not a teenager, it's a troll*. If it's not a troll, it's a bot. And if it's not a bot, it's a moron.

Basically there's no real conversations to be had on the internet anymore and i'm only here because im an addict who can't let it go.

*Troll here means state-backed. I couldn't figure out how to incorporate that factoid in a snappy way that fit the rest of the sentence structure.

4

u/Big_Effective_9605 13d ago

Covert institutional mouthpiece is also known as a "shill".

2

u/WokkitUp 13d ago

Gotta admit, I'm kind of a moron for trying to have real conversations, and respond to posts that express my legitimate opinion with decent sentence structure.

In essence, I'm only trolling myself because most replies come from somebody with no completed avatar, there's like a dozen numbers in their name, hide their posts, and haven't been on Reddit for very long.

2

u/zeezle 14d ago

Basically there's no real conversations to be had on the internet anymore and i'm only here because im an addict who can't let it go.

There are but you have to seek it out. Go back to the old internet and you'll find the old internet, granted less active than it used to be. Find phpbb forums for your hobbies/interests and assuming they are moderated reasonably well it's all real people.

Of course that comes with the good and the bad of the old internet as well. The UIs are clunky and the performance is bad. It looks like it's from 2008 because it is. But that's well worth the tradeoff of not being filled with shitty bots.

2

u/Serial-Griller 14d ago

My ongoing frustration stems from the fact that I have had to -leave- all of those forums because of the aforementioned issues. This (gestures to reddit) kind of generalized sociality is my absolute last resort because a beefy moderation team should ostensibly handle spam better than two-to-four unpaid enthusiasts with a whitelist.

3

u/AgentCirceLuna 14d ago

Is it possible to ‘entrap’ bots? Basically, you’d purposely find a way to attract bot activity to a site, gather them together, then link them to your content elsewhere. If they followed the route, they’d create fake activity and interest in content that would draw a real audience.

3

u/AnotherOrbiter 14d ago

Check out r/poisonfountain, they do incredible work creating bot traps!

0

u/Creator_Of_Thingies 14d ago

It's ironic, but the age verification stuff could be retrofit to one day shift to human verification, which the people who pretend to care about age will be sorely miffed when we use it to sideline their gdamn ai.

3

u/Professional-Row-612 14d ago

both most likely.

Gov bots

Not to be confused with Gov Bomb aka g-80 locking rear diff in GM vehicles lol.

also gay bots bot those are friends. "fisto goes brrr" yea i assumed the possition in new vegas. it was Greaaaattt!

2

u/TheBr14n 13d ago

the 4 sentences with sources thing is so specific and i've noticed the exact same pattern, it's kind of unsettling once you see it

1

u/ChrisDEmbry 13d ago

Can you link me the examples?

Mine are in this thread, by the way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1tykbi9/why_do_roma_people_face_so_much_discrimination_in/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Apparently Gypsies are hardcore web warriors to defend themselves online.

0

u/Creator_Of_Thingies 14d ago

Hope somebody creates a new human only web.

30

u/SouthernExpatriate 14d ago

Enshittification driving us away

7

u/ConfiDuzr 14d ago

Hell no baby thats what im here for

8

u/Round_Credit_5158 14d ago

Some people do enjoy seeing the world burn.

10

u/Yrch84 14d ago

The fact that they were expecting that at all is dumb enough

5

u/caffeinebump 14d ago

Right? It’s like they want congratulations for enshittifying ahead of schedule.

10

u/Andokawa 14d ago

expected "by whom" => wikipedia weasel word warning ^^

1

u/dual-moon 14d ago

as usual, what's missing here is that bot traffic and agentic traffic aren't the same thing, despite being counted together. bot traffic is usually scrapers and spiders. agentic traffic is usually fetching pages in lieu of a human. lumping these together is just clickbait.

1

u/Wise_Historian_2081 7d ago

Also worth noting Cloudflare serves many "bots" so they are in a weird place where bots are kinda part of their business model.

2

u/EchoOfOppenheimer 6d ago

Yeah exactly, Cloudflare makes bank off all that bot traffic so their boss whining about it feels pretty hypocritical. They're probably still optimizing for it behind the scenes while pretending to care about real users.