Mastodawn

João França 6d ago

Bots just officially outnumbered humans on the internet for the first time ever. Cloudflare’s latest report shows AI and agentic traffic has grown so fast its now the majority of online traffic. We crossed a line and most people didn’t even notice 😳 https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic#bot-vs-human

Dead internet theory is now becoming a reality

nixCraft 🐧6d ago

What it means?
1 Bots watching ads created by AI agents
2 Bots watching videos and ads too
3 Bots writing and reading your email
5 When you send your resume for job application, bots will decide whether you are qualified for the job etc
6 Bots creating music and video content and watching or listening to it etc

@nixCraft all the sapiens, back to the Stone Age.

🏳️‍⚧️ Chloé: ADhdSL 512Kb/s 6d ago

@nixCraft
To get ads, it implies bots execute javascript without limitations.
I'm really not convinced of that point.

David Ginn 6d ago

@nixCraft I think the data is open to interpretation. Seems a bit premature to jump to conclusions. How is this measured, by hits, data usage, or time spent? Humans make fewer requests but are likely to spend more time on a page, and humans are the ones telling the bots to pull the data.

EndlessMason 6d ago

@david @nixCraft
Yeah, but it's only like 10 humans telling those bots to do that, and it makes up for half of everybody's bandwidth bills ...

David Ginn 6d ago

@EndlessMason @nixCraft Have they passed those bills on to consumers? I imagine AI data centres and large companies are paying for the data transfer.

WanWizard 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇳🇱6d ago

@david @EndlessMason @nixCraft Eh, no. In most cases, the owners of the sites pay.

I have rackspace in a datacentre for my servers, which means I have to pay for bandwidth by the Mbps.

These bots are a contineously growning menace. Not only because of the costs, but also because some fire hunderds of requests a second at a host, causing either the webserver to crash, with a loss of service as a result.

I've started blackholing entire network ranges in an attempt to stop them.

David Ginn 6d ago

@wanwizard @EndlessMason @nixCraft the owners of the sites have the costs passed along to them, yes. I’m just saying that consumers aren’t footing the bill. My broadband bill is not fluctuating from the data use associated with AI. That’s what I was getting at.

EndlessMason 6d ago

@david @wanwizard @nixCraft
Yeah, just the people having their faces scraped off pay for the bandwidth... I guess the scrapers do too, but i bet they're on a better plan than me.

Paweł Świątkowski 6d ago

@EndlessMason also download has always been cheaper than upload @david @wanwizard @nixCraft

EndlessMason 6d ago

@katafrakt @david @wanwizard @nixCraft
If I am a web server, which way is "up"?

WanWizard 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇳🇱6d ago

@EndlessMason @katafrakt @david @nixCraft If you host yourself, it doesn't matter. I pay per Mbps per month, no matter which direction the traffic is in.

David Ginn 5d ago

@wanwizard @EndlessMason @katafrakt @nixCraft It’s why I self host. I could never afford space in a data centre. My “server” is a Pi 5 with an nvme drive. Still manage to do a lot with very little though, and minimal power consumption.

WanWizard 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇳🇱5d ago

@david @EndlessMason @katafrakt @nixCraft We operate on a different scale, we have a full rack (about 30U in use) and host for both our developers and clients.

sheislaurence 6d ago

@david @nixCraft I am not sure that 'time spent on a page' is a useful metric in that context, given AI can consume in half a second what would take you 10min to read. If more than 50% of activity, incl. generative, is done by AI, you cannot keep believing that the internet will remain a place accessible to users. It will exclusively serve the interests of the bots, or rather, bots owners, a proper #feudal or #colonisation model, at a scale never seen before.

@david @nixCraft I tend to download the page in Documents folder to decrease my internet usage 😅

h0nza 🌄 🏊🚴6d ago

@nixcraft that is so scary...

@nixCraft 7. Advertisers waste money paying to advertise to eyeballs that don’t exist; that will never be customers, probably go out of business etc

Ingonymous 6d ago

@nixCraft
7 Bots are silently stealing every fourth point in a list

@nixCraft You're drawing false conclusions.

The data you've provided doesn't prove any of your statements. Doomsaying and fearmongering doesn't help anyone.

neødreen 6d ago

@nixCraft bots watching ads sounds like the first thing corporations will use against AI when their earnings get affected.

draNgNon 6d ago

@neodreen what if the ads convince the AI agent to purchase something @nixCraft

neødreen 5d ago

@draNgNon @nixCraft is that an actual intended purchase tho? Because users can issue chargebacks and that ends up damaging the businesses even more than no one clicking the ads.

draNgNon 5d ago

@neodreen I was thinking more of agents deployed by enterprises, not consumers, but you might be right either way. I'm just thinking for sure someone will become clever and hand procurement responsibilities to AI agents. I personally will procure some popcorn for watching such shenanigans @nixCraft

Christian Gudrian 6d ago

@nixCraft From now on we're only guests here.

JR Dumas 6d ago

@nixCraft Probably the saddest thing I've read this past month. Or past year maybe. #deadinternet

Piotr Gaczkowski 6d ago

@jrdumas @nixCraft there were bots before the slop machines and there'll be bots after the slop machines. Some of them do really useful work.

@nixCraft So our internet subscriptions will become more expensive in order to pay for all that bot traffic... 😞

@theyosh @nixCraft

Sooooo...about that meshcore stuff...

@TeflonTrout
non-viable architecture for anything serious
@theyosh @nixCraft

@mancube @theyosh @nixCraft

Serious to me means I can send text across town in an emergency. So....probably not quite there maybe, but headed that way I hope

@TeflonTrout
if only a handful of people have access to it in an emergency then it'll be fine. the curve of users vs reliability is saw shaped.
@theyosh @nixCraft

celeste_hearts_disability_pride

@nixCraft

Considering the bloody thing can't identify humans reliably, who's to say this is true?
The bugger throwing a Hissy Fit and blocking you for daring to use a VPN does not make you a bot.

EDIT: NB I am saying the figure could be higher or lower.
Cloudflare is the bane of my online existence.

@AnguaDelphine @nixCraft If you have access to raw log files like I had in my career as a web developer, it's easy to spot the bot traffic because much of it spiders individual elements rather than requesting a page as a human would. You can also spot the same network of IPs making requests over and over. You can also spot when the same IP changes their browser ID each time a new request is made. People don't do that.

Stefan Bohacek 6d ago

@nixCraft Also wild to look at Singapore: Bot: 90% Human 10%

https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/sg#bot-vs-human

Context:

https://www.wired.com/story/made-in-china-niche-websites-are-seeing-a-surge-of-mysterious-traffic-from-china/

eestileib (she/hers)6d ago

Ban AI

BoloMKXXVIII 6d ago

@nixCraft
Just wait until advertisers realize humans are not seeing their ads. Ad revenue is going to tank.

The ads are paid by the customers, not the advertisers...

tootbrute 6d ago

@BoloMKXXVIII @nixCraft let's help that along

Install AdNaseum. Clicks every and all ads in the background.

thethuthinnang 6d ago

@nixCraft Thanks for this information. I was looking at the site you linked and when I scrolled up, it showed that worldwide the USA is by far the largest user of Cloudflare. So, does that mean the statistics in the screenshot may only be more true for USA than for other countries? Edit:

Here is the screenshot when you just look at USA https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/us#bot-vs-human

@nixCraft I say we give it to them. Ideally, we can hold the Fedi, but let the bots have the corporate internet. Much the same way I want to give the oligarchs Texas provided they withdraw from the rest of the world and leave the real people alone.

derptron 6d ago

@EMStoveken @nixCraft I've been noting a lot of Texas plates in the area and I live nowhere near Texas :p

For real. I was just this morning looking up a business name that I saw on one because it's tripping me out. This is an area they'd target for invasion.

"US Infrastructure Company" -- after the whole weird company making brand new IT infrastructure for the "govt." it freaked me out but it looks benign.

"They hate our freedoms." :p

Makes me sad. Me feeling like this.

Curioso 🍉 🇺🇦 (jgg)6d ago

The data is about requests, not individuals.

Since an agentic AI can make thousands of request in a very short time, we can assume that a typical agentic AI makes much more requests a day than a human, so the number of humans on the Internet would be still much bigger than AI agents.

It is sad to see that more than half of the traffic is due to bots, but let's don't blow it out of proportion.

@nixCraft I just retired after being a web developer for 30 years. At the end (and one of the major reasons I retired) was that bot traffic to my clients sites was about 90%.

Email traffic to my server was about 98% spam.

It's like building a 10 lane freeway for one lane of legitimate traffic.

AI Winter is Coming 6d ago

Time for a #the_internet_is_for_the_people movement.

Olaf Bohlen 6d ago

@nixCraft oh ffs, I had to remove a lot of content from my personal webserver (or lock it away) because the bot traffic almost was a DDoS attack

Oliver Schafeld 6d ago

Bulletin Board Systems to the rescue.

🤓🙂‍↕️

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE&ra=m

#bbs #documentary

BBS: The Documentary

Long before the Internet escaped from the lab, connected the planet and redefined what it meant to use a computer...there was a brave and pioneering band of ...

YouTube

<- Giant Hungry Robot 6d ago

@oliver_schafeld this is absolutely wonderful, I'm binge-watching it right now and I am completely struck by the passion in these people

Oliver Schafeld 6d ago

It was the same experience for me watching the BBS documentary for the first time. ☺️

David Willanski 6d ago

@oliver_schafeld I remember tweeting about the DVDs of that which I found in the library. Jason Scott (the director) replied asking which library

punIssuer 6d ago

@nixCraft ClaudeFlare...

Danish Akhtar 6d ago

So, the Dead #internet Conspiracy theory was true.

Anthony David 6d ago

[Insert Planet of the Apes beach scene]

😱

Frenezul0_o 6d ago

@nixCraft I am constantly accused of being a bot due to use of NoScript. Then I have to keep enabling things and refreshing until the page more or less works. Often with many refreshes before I appear human enough.

I should just set my browser agent string to "Hey I am a human please let me in."

el Celio 🇪🇺 🇺🇦6d ago

dead? why dead?

@elCelio @nixCraft Because over half the internet is not alive. The half that is will quickly be pushed to the fringes before we give up on it completely.

Sibshops 6d ago

@nixCraft We passed it before this, unofficially. This graph doesn't include bots pretending to be humans. It only includes bots admitting they are bots.

@nixCraft I can assure you we noticed.

Daniel AJ Sokolov 6d ago

@nixCraft HTTP is not "the internet".

If you look at the top of the webpage you've linked, it says that 66% of traffic is for Human users.

@nixCraft
Ai is a fucking out of control plague like ebola