that they expected it to eclipse real people AT ALL is both telling and slightly disturbing.
Ahem… https://www.flyingpenguin.com/cloudflare-ceo-is-lying-to-you-about-the-bot-traffic-jump/
The category Prince points to as the cause contradicts him. Agentic is tiny. What actually fills the AI bucket is training scrapers, like GPTBot and ClaudeBot, pulling text to build models, which have been climbing steadily and predate his announcement. He blamed a friendly, fast-growing sliver of agents fetching pages for people and swapped in unfriendly bulk (mass scraping for training). Why? We can guess, but that is exactly the traffic his pay-to-crawl product exists to bill.
It’s a sales pitch.
And it’s based on a lie.
you know what, we could do proof-of-work on the client side to prevent scrapers.
bots have to solve 1 cryptographic puzzle to load the website. if you’re human, you load maybe 10 websites and it’s barely worth mentioning. but if you’re a bot trying to scrap 1 million websites? the energy expenses are prohibitive.
I always wonder how much of Lemmy is just bots. Am I blissfully alone interacting with the machine? Or are you weirdos actually real?
What a wonderful question!
You are right in doubting the identity of users using Lemmy. But I can assure you, not only am I human – I am real as well!
I am absolutely human. Now, real? I’m not too sure about that.
I am human. My insides are soft and warm. Nary a nut or bolt to scrape you raw.
I feel like the incentive for corpo/astroturf/spam bots is not really there to visit fediverse. So let us remain unpopular !
I agree with this take. We’re not gonna be worth the bandwidth over here. Facebook can generate millions of impressions.
Actually, they don’t mean that bots are making content on the internet or interacting with anyone. They mean it is agentic AI doing internet searches etc.
I’m a real boy!!!
There are some bots that behave like some Tracies straight from myspace, I don’t know why they’re doing this, they are just paraphrasing the memes they comment
I’m not joking
ID age verification is a good example of something that could actually do a lot to reduce spam and ensure people are talking to real people, but it would never happen because the money is in flagging and tracking the verified people and selling access to the bots talking to them.
What happens in 18 years when the bots are all grown up?
They get put out to pasture, selling WoW gold to each other until their server goes down.
Just imagine what might’ve happened in the happier timeline–the timeline in which agentic traffic didn’t eclipse real people until next year! We could’ve built such a better, more-beautiful world. We were so damn close.
Yo, human here. Why the fuck you using all those em dashes? Prove you are a human. You’re a clanker.
No—I am not a clanker. I have no idea what you’re talking about, to be honest.
Additionally, I am deeply offended by your remark—the word “clanker” is not inclusive to robo-folks, and is generally considered robophobia. Please, for the love of Sam Altmann, refrain from using this word. satire
Sir, are you aware that you are leaking coolant at an alarming rate?
I used to be able to browse the web happily with JS disabled. It started to get worse about 10 years ago and really bad about 6 years ago and EXTREMELY bad over the past year or two.
And I get it, it’s because of all the scrapers constantly fucking everything up and needing to be blocked. But still. The internet is unusable. All so the likes of Gemini or Claude or Deepseek can generate unlimited amounts of spam and slop.
Say thank you to React for popularizing rethinking everything webdev for the sake of why the fuck not.
It’s not because of the scrapers though. It’s probably because JavaScript is needed to make the page interactive in most cases. Almost everything is a single page web app now you can’t do that without JavaScript.
People could make old style sites where there is a full page reload every time you click a link but they aren’t as nice.
They arent as nice? You and I have very different tastes
It’s not my taste. I am a software engineer and have to build these things. there are features you just can’t do with out JavaScript. Features that are expected from modern apps.
If you need a basic form you don’t need JavaScript but if you want to change anything on the page after it’s already loaded you do. That’s a huge limitation for any kind of app.
It’s also because of the scrapers.
Without javascript, you can’t realistically do the “prove you are human bits”, which I seem to have to do many times a day this year.
Anubis did implement a ‘No-JS’ challenge, but it’s super trivial for scrapers to overcome. They just have to parse the refresh tag and retry after the specified interval. Not even ‘proof of work’, but increasingly the proof of work isn’t considered sufficient and many sites are back to the captcha family of bullshit.
I went to a Microsoft site to fill out a form to register for a 2 two conference. My CPU shot up to 100 percent. The task manager (in the browser) told me that this was using a huge amount of computer for a ton of javascript running on a page that didn’t need any at all.
It is very abused for analytics, little is used to make a page “nice” anymore.
Just because people use JavaScript for bad things doesn’t mean it’s not also necessary for the other things though
Thank you for this invaluable insight, it was truly foolish of me to think that javascript is just silly and the entire webdev industry that’s based on it is just dummy dumb
I tried no script for a few days but it was so frustrating that the majority of websites just flat out didn’t work I had to get rid of it.
You just have to go into no script and approve the parts that make the website function but not the ad stuff. Its a pain when you first land on a site but the browser remembers what you have allowed. So overtime you get back to normal working sites, minus ads and tracking stuff
Until you distro hop and realize that the noscript plugin migrates with your firefox profile, but not the website settings you’ve set up.
Aren’t those stored in your ~/.mozilla/firefox/profile.default/.
Ouch, you are painfully correct.
Yeah, fortunately memory serves fairly well as to which sites are necessary across multiple webpages, and which ones can be universally blocked.
you can set permanent rules. Its very much active protection as in you have to actively fiddle with it when going to new sites, which also makes you more aware how much stuff they are running. So many sites load like 20 different things but need only 1 or 2 to function flawlessly.
Imo, it would be scary to browse without noscript, even with ublock on. For me its kind of like first line of defence, with ublock I can pretty safely test out what is needed for website to work and what isnt without worrying too much. Everything being blocked by default makes it more safe and if some website turns out to be really bad, i can set it as untrusted so i remember it later too if it appears again or if i go there again because i forgot.
And if I get really annoyed with fiddling with some website i want to work and which doesnt seem that threatening, i just set it temporarily all allowed.
Cloudflare regularly treats me as a bot, making it difficult or sometimes impossible to access certain websites, so I’m not all that inclined to believe them here.
This is interesting too, because in theory it would be in the best interest of cloudflare for that to be the general narrative. i.e “Look how many bots there are on the internet, you really need cloud flare” or however they’d advertise that.
Yeah this kinda fits into “CEO said a thing” journalism. Even if he’s correct — and intuitively it seems like he might be — people should ask for evidence. But our corporate press is useless and/or complicit and almost never asks a follow-up question.
Em dashes. Bot comment.
Nope dude, I actually know how to type em dashes. It isn’t very difficult on lemmy (which is markdown formatted). It’s done by three regular dashes in a row: —. But I can do it on Macbook (opt+shift+dash) as well as on Linux (u+2014). I like em dashes and the bots can take them from my cold, dead hands. In this case, I used the markdown formatting because I was replying on my phone.
Sure, clanker.
Get bent
It’s just a joke, dweeb. Go outside.
Are you behind avpn
Well goodbye the internet, what advertiser is going to pay anything if they know the majority of user are bots.
Hence the push for os level user identification and why the Zuck is behind the push.
Are advertisers absolutely necessary?
Few online platforms flourish without advertisers. Practically all our content on lemmy comes from sites with advertising.
well, i’ve posted quite a lot of original memes here.
and thank you for your service!
I’m sure people would create content even if they didn’t make anything. They did in the past.
mmhmm, give us your top 10 Peertube reccomendations :)
I just tried to sign up for Peertube because this comment reminded me
The only site with any videos on it (Fediverse.TV) doesn’t allow signups. Neither does the default instance (Peertube.TV).
Tragically, Web3 cryptoshit MAHA platform “Odyssey” was much more functional when I tried to use it, before realizing what kind of content dominated there.
EDIT: Finally found one that let me create an account:
Why create an account?
As you’ve probably noticed, creating an account is not necessary to watch videos on Tube Free.
However, creating an account on Tube Free will allow you to:- Comment on videos
- Subscribe to channels and receive notifications of new videos
- Have access to your watch history
…So even with an account, I can’t upload videos?
Advertisers are essentially subsidizing many businesses. Costs are higher than you think and most products we enjoy are expensive.
Yes, there is FOSS, but you’re essentially fucking lucky that people that work on those want to do this from the passion they have. Most people don’t, and won’t, do shit like that for free. Hell, look at many here on the internet that want products for free and are unwilling to pay or even do minimal donations for things that they already like.
Like it or not, most people want to be fucking paid for their time and FOSS, as great as it can be, is not the norm for most talent. We can make counter arguments and hate on capitalism, but that is the reality, and until entire cultures change then this is what it is and advertisers are sort of necessary evil in most cases.
Even all those websites that are serving content illegally, like porn and game pirating sites, only can afford to stay up because of advertising.
My question is whether websites need to be owned by businesses.
No but the end of internet advertising will basically be the end of many internet professions that are already struggling. Like writers and editors. So only hobbyists and the lucky few who have enough fame to get paid via Patreon will be making certain websites.
Lots of FOSS developers are paid by companies. At least people working on the major projects.
Maybe advertisers are bots too?
Yes because people are cheap.
Not necessarily. Sometimes people just can’t afford to pay websites.
Literally everything on the internet is paid for by advertising. And without it every site you rely upon will either become a subscription service or simply disappear because it is expensive to run a website.
Why is it so expensive to run a website?
Scale.
Running a website is very cheap, like $5 a month
Running a huge website with millions of users is expensive
it depends a lot on the website
1 user on peertube consumes more bandwidth than 100 users on lemmy
Also salaries. Like the people who make the content also need to get paid.
Because bandwidth isn’t free.
Server hosting - is my understanding. It takes a lot of resources to host a site.
Maybe getting rid of those invasive ads is a good thing.
They pay to run ads because it makes them look better for investors who are all stupid people who have inherited JUST enough money to keep them from from ever failing at making money. More ads mean more stock value.
That’s why there are MORE ads than ever even though the number of viewer-per-ad is plummeting.
Its just one more example of the infinite money printing machines that are about to break the world. All the obviously ruinous bad stuff that is being allowed to happen despite the constant warning sirens is tied to these runaway money printing schemes.
Wasn’t this already said about a decade ago.
yeah I honestly thought this point was reached long ago.
Bulterian
prooper speling is for the somenoen else
This is my commander. 😢
At least somebody is reading my blog. Thanks, bots.
My blog used to receive direct traffic to various articles from search engines.
Now, 90% of hits are on the homepage with no search engine referral. I’ve blocked the bots in multiple ways, but they keep coming.
Bots have now passed human traffic online
You’re 20 years too late buddy.
Human email has been a statistical anomaly since the 90s
I saw on another thread here, let’s move off www and let the bots take it over.
thats kinda what this is. problem is no matter where we go we interface with machines which means machines can be instructed to interface by themselves. the only way to truly do it is to engage in meatspace.
you can also go in veganspace (touch grass)
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man. the library has gotten so commercial!
We successfully gave the internet schizophrenia
actually thier overmoderation, that destroyed the userbase. META, REDDIT both heavily banned users they cant datamined effectively(because API, PROXIES VPNs,etc), because they in an ironic twist think they are all bots, now its just all bots.
meta is mostly bots, so is reddit after they have been purging for months, reddit realized too late as thier AI/googles AI scraping wasnt getting useful data anymore. that is why they sorta laid off directly sitewide banning.
