To me, the Internet as we know it is dead. I’m trying to build a new, better “internet”. Don’t know how, yet, but I have a concept of a plan.

My kids are getting old enough to get their own computers. I got them two mini-PC’s, put Mint on them, and for now a few DOS games. They are at the age where they still sound out everything they read or write, but it won’t take long before they’d like to go online. For now, though, they are happy with some of the games I used to play. Right now it’s Duck Tales, Dynablaster and Grand Prix Circuit, but I hope to introduce them to Sierra and Lucasarts adventures later, and Microprose strategies even later.

But I digress. I don’t want to let them onto the Internet, even if I disable access to some sites (they’re bound to find a way around). Instead, I’d like to self-host my own Internet. It would be largely static, with entire downloaded Web sites, and I’m currently compiling a list of what I’d give them. I’m also thinking of curating a selection of news articles, which I’d grab and present to them via my own server. As time goes by, I’d slowly immerse them in more, but my goal is to grow them to be discerning young adults, who’d know better what to believe and what to share than my generation did.

Other parents in my kids’ school have the same concerns. I was talking to some about my idea, and they’d like to join. Some of them are far more knowledgeable than me in the technical aspects of this undertaking (I’m still using a LAMP stack for all my needs). At the end, we may end up with a local “internet”, with its own dedicated message board, perhaps some social pages, and relatively harmless content. If we had this idea, you can bet that thousands of other communities already had a similar idea. I fully expect the human internet to eventually fragment into tiny local internets, and the traditional internet becoming a giant circle-jerk of AI’s in circular conversation.

The meat is living but the soul has been dead for years.

It’s more like a ghoul, neither alive but dead and feeding on humans to sustain it’s unholy existence.

Depends on your definition. The majority of internet traffic is already ‘bots.’ The big platforms seem very interested in creating AI chatbots that will give the illusion of community and friendship, or at least engagement. It’s unlikely the old ways will ever fully disappear. There are still a few BBSs out there after all, but it will likely asymptotically approach ‘dead’ from now on.

The old internet (small privately hosted websites and blogs, organized in web rings) still exists, and may have more content than ever. It’s just such a small subset of the internet now, and gets ignored by search engines, so it’s hard to find.

It’s hard to say on many levels. However, to keep things brief, I’d say that the “Dead Internet Theory” is no longer a theory, but rather… law.

Beep boop. No computers in sight, just fellow humans, fellow human! Boop beep!

Yes

I’d say we’re not there yet, but yeah, LLMs and image generators have accelerated it to the point, where I expect it to only take a few more years.

Gonna be interesting. There’s definitely going to be some enclaves, like invite-only places (in particular messengers), and potentially the fediverse won’t be worth targeting directly. But we do get lots of second-hand content here from places which are worth targeting, so yeah, will probably still notice the change here in one form or another.

The fact that you, a human, asked this question, and got a variety of human replies is why I would say no.

I know that the dead internet theory doesn’t say that all internet activity is bots, but certainly the internet that I experience, there is abundant humanity.

However, I am a nerd who inhabits quite niche spaces, so my experience is far from the typical. Having the knowledge and stubbornness to find spaces like this puts me in a kind of bubble, where it’s hard for me to gauge whether we’re actually at the point of “dead internet”.

In all likelihood, my answer is “no”, because I need it to be. I love the internet. I grew up online, and as a very lonely child, the internet was a key part of my identity formation. As an adult, the internet is how I access community and learning. As grim as things are, I think I’m a utopian at heart.

Like I say, I realise that my online experience is far from what most people experience, and I do find it sad that most people probably do experience a much deader internet than I do. But the reason why I’m here, putting time and care into comments like this is because this is one of the ways that I am trying to keep the internet alive. “Dead” is a binary, which suggests the battle is already over. I believe the internet is dying, for sure, but I can’t reconcile the notion of a dead internet with all the vibrant communities of people who are making stuff they care about, in defiance of the slop economy.

Smaller sites like niche phpBB forums are barely hanging on under the tide of spammers and crawlers (AI or otherwise). They don’t have the means to defend against what is effectively a DDoS, and are forced to increase the onboarding friction by requiring an email requesting an account or use other things like CAPTCHA or stoop to using a centralized CDN like Cloudflare.

Yeh. It’s been a zombie for a long time. Depersonalisation, censorship, monetisation, trackers, bots, inability to search. Everything’s so clinically useless.

Matter of perspective. Earlier today, I told a coworker how happy I am to have been born in the late 1980’s, because it spared me from the internet culture of today: shallow, exploitative, otherizing and it encourages short term dopamine kicks. It’s a breeding ground for media illiteracy, bigotry, xenophobia and narrow mindedness in general - which is ironic, since it also makes the culminated knowledge of human kind easily accessible, which has the potential to open your mind if you have internet access and if you use the internet wisely. Anyway, in a way, the internet of today is a crystalization of everything that’s making me have a gloomy outlook on the future and keeping me from wanting to have children.

I grew up with the knowledge that “Internet routes around damage”. In those days that referred to censorship and walled gardens.

I’m not sure if and how it would work with disinformation and AI slop as the damage to route around of.

I’m cautious but hopeful.

fediverse kinda seems alive tho