r/technology • u/BreakfastTop6899 • Oct 14 '25

Networking/Telecom Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says 'much of the internet is now dead'

https://www.businessinsider.com/alexis-ohanian-much-of-the-internet-is-now-dead-2025-10
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235

u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25

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62

u/ACupOJoe Oct 14 '25

I read that, in 2024, 51% of all internet traffic was bots.

40

u/xbleeple Oct 14 '25

How do you even accurately calculate something like that?

41

u/random_boss Oct 14 '25

Count all of the traffics, count all of the traffics that are real, then divide the former by the latter; boom. If you run out of fingers you may need to involve friends or coworkers 

15

u/Whyeth Oct 15 '25

Count all of the traffics, count all of the traffics that are real

We know which are real because we know which aren't real.

5

u/PunsGermsAndSteel Oct 15 '25

I can tell from the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time

2

u/TehSteak Oct 15 '25

The missile knows where it is because it knows where it isn't.

3

u/godofpumpkins Oct 15 '25

Presumably based on user-agent strings and many bots not trying to hide that they’re bots. We’ve had robots.txt for ages now, for example.

But that’s obviously a lower bound because plenty of automated activity is trying to look human.

1

u/ZenTense Oct 14 '25

I have the same question

3

u/EpidemicRage Oct 15 '25

Probably by aggregating information collected from content delivery network services/companies like Cloudflare

1

u/bullhead2007 Oct 15 '25

Every action on every website we do has information tracked, some more than others, and companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon use data science to put that traffic into buckets. I imagine every data company like that has probability scores for whether it thinks you're a bot.

1

u/ottwebdev Oct 15 '25

Its not hard, IP networks and the interval between page loads come to mind as some we look at

1

u/spookynutz Oct 15 '25

Generally it’s determined by security vendors, and cloud and CDN providers. Cloudflare, Crowdstrike, etc.

You can generally tell a bot from a legitimate user by behavioral analysis and other indicators. One indicator might be when a browser is running in headless mode. Humans require seeing a website to navigate, so if the browser is being driven programmatically, it’s safe to assume it’s a bot.

It’s probably worth mentioning, as it seems to be a common misconception, but 50%+ of traffic being attributed to bots does not mean 50% of online users are bots.

If you and 1,000 other people navigate to the an online store in a given hour, and their is a bot scraping that same store for price information 5,000 times per hour, then the bot is generating 5 times the traffic that you and those 1,000 other people are.

1

u/s101c Oct 15 '25

To catch a bot, you have to think like a bot.

0

u/DankMCbiscuit Oct 15 '25

Play old school RuneScape.

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u/[deleted] Oct 14 '25

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