Internet — The End is Nigh

Comments

• Noct Member

  June 9

  @rcy026 said:

  I totally agree here.
  Also, one must keep in mind that the bot traffic is generated for a reason. Sure, a big part is just bots, spam and malware, background noise. But I suspect a big part of it is AI, webcrawlers and searchengines scraping the net, which if you think one step further is just another interface for humans accessing the internet. The classical way of accessing the internet by typing a URL into a browser is no longer the only way we access the internet, we might just as well talk to an AI and get the information that way. It's a different interface, but the source of information is still the same.
  If we insist on looking at percentages only it gets kind of skewed if we do not take into account that a big part of the bot traffic is actually generated by human interaction, in one way or another.

  Also, I wonder how they classify bots. If I order something online it might generate a bunch of api calls between manufacturer, seller and shipping. Are those api calls classified as bot traffic or human traffic? One single "human" interaction with a website might generate dozens of api calls, if you count api calls and similar as bot traffic that would skew the statistics enormously.

  Did you arrive at that excellent reframing, or are you a different interface?

  Thanked by 1default
• rcy026 Member

  June 9

  @default said:

  @rcy026 said:

  @raindog308 said:

  @default said: The internet is dying. 57% of internet traffic is just bots.

  So what?

  50% of all email sent is spam. That hasn't killed email.

  I think there is a logical fallacy here because it assumes that there is some kind of cap on Internet traffic. Looking at percentages is the wrong way to look at things. If there is $X exabytes of human activity and we add in exabytes and exabytes of bot traffic, that doesn't change the human activity. I don't think it's right to think that bot traffic is going to "crowd out" the humans, which is what's being implied when you look at it as a percentage.

  The classical way of accessing the internet by typing a URL into a browser is no longer the only way we access the internet, we might just as well talk to an AI and get the information that way. It's a different interface, but the source of information is still the same.
  If we insist on looking at percentages only it gets kind of skewed if we do not take into account that a big part of the bot traffic is actually generated by human interaction, in one way or another.

  So... there is no point in having an information website anymore if only AI visits it and you get mostly just bots? Why would anyone try to gain visitors and present some information online?

  That's a very strange conclusion and not related to what I said at all, but ok.
  If the reason you run a website is to spread information, then how that information is spread should be more or less irrelevant. Setup the website and let it be crawled, who cares if it's by bots or humans.
  If the only reason is to attract human visitors then there are plenty of technologies you can use to try to keep everything that is not a browser out. Half of the traffic is still human and a big part still uses ordinary browsers, so if that's the only traffic you are interested in then by all means, aim for that part and ignore the rest.
  Almost every website in existence caters to a specific target group, I can not see why this should be handled any differently.

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• user3028938 Member

  June 9

  @raindog308 said:

  @default said: The internet is dying. 57% of internet traffic is just bots.

  So what?

  50% of all email sent is spam. That hasn't killed email.

  I think there is a logical fallacy here because it assumes that there is some kind of cap on Internet traffic. Looking at percentages is the wrong way to look at things. If there is $X exabytes of human activity and we add in exabytes and exabytes of bot traffic, that doesn't change the human activity. I don't think it's right to think that bot traffic is going to "crowd out" the humans, which is what's being implied when you look at it as a percentage.

  Wow, strong counter to the OP.

  Thanked by 1default