"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content, marginalizing human activity. The date given for this "death" is generally around 2016 or 2017."
What I find funny about that framing is that, regardless of whether or not the theory has merit, a conspiracy theory by definition asserts that there exists two or more people conspiring with the intent to produce the alleged outcome. From what I understand, dead Internet theory alleges no such collusion or intent. I could be wrong but I believe that it merely suggests that the amount of bot-generated activity has come to dwarf human generated content to the point where the Internet is effectively "dead" from the perspective of its original purpose: humans sharing human knowledge.
10 or so years ago I wound up blocking everyone other than Google in my robots.txt because I was sick and tired of webcrawlers from China crawling my site twice a day and never sending me a single referrer. Same with Bing. Back when I was involved with SEO the joke was you could rank #1 for Viagra on Bing and get three hits a month.
At least so far according to Cloudflare bots consist of around 1/4 of all internet traffic. But that could be pretty far off depending on how they get those estimates.
The figure I saw most recently was 42%. Weirdly my brain can remember the number but not where I saw it.
But what I'm curious about, whichever number is true, is whether people mean "malicious bots" when they say this, or just any kind of autonomous agent. And also whether they are counting volume of data or simply network requests.
Because if by "bot" they just mean "autonomous agent making a network request" then honestly I'm surprised the number isn't higher, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Every search crawler, every service detector, all the financial bots, every smart device (which is now every device) and a thousand other more or less legitimate uses.
I've got a script for parsing my web logs which removes all the lines which match persistent indexers/bots/scrapers and any obvious automatons. Logs generally shrink to 40-50% of their volume, so I'd at least double CF's estimate.
"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content, marginalizing human activity. The date given for this "death" is generally around 2016 or 2017."
Not sure I'd call it a conspiracy theory.