I think there’s also an adjunct to this that a lot of the internet is locked in discord and other unindexed or searchable locations. Just dead knowledge never to be seen again.
It's not just a theory. Anyone who've seen internet before 2015 knows the difference.
An unforeseeable and unfortunate side effect of humans interacting daily with bots masquerading as humans is that we mimic them.
And that we lose our ability to see humanity in others. Being flooded with machines who cannot understand or be touched, influenced, which whom we cannot empathize changed the way we see our fellow humans.
I don't think there's any coming back from that. Hopefully there's a way forward, now that AI's aren't a big secret anymore.
It was far more tinfoil a few years ago. Especially when the "bots" were far more likely to just be people paid to post things from a script. Back then there just wasn't much evidence of the tech being that good. Like human made content on YouTube has a noticable difference from generated content and that generated content probably still had some human help.
It has more legs today with chatgpt or similar tech. It clearly been used for pumping out crap articles and videos or being used for automating the early steps in scamming. There are even a few AI generated influencers and a few chatgpt based things designed to simulate a relationship.
Unoriginal bullshit is what a lot of the so called content creation is. The amount of leech accounts that pump the same clips, memes, and other content that circumvent OG creator content is insane. It’s all just a content casino designed to push ads that everyone hates because THAT industry is a bunch of unoriginal creators (which is why their industry is suffering and ads need to be forced into your devices and PCs).
And now we have some clone of Twitch called Kick which is just a shill gambling site. Basically a bunch of criminals masquerading as a business that skirts US regulations. They provably pump their viewer numbers which should be illegal.
So, the thing is that internet gives you a freedom to select what you actually want to see. But most consumers have inherited television and radio habits, and consume the internet in the same way. That beeing going on the most known media platforms and just beeing fed what the algorithmes send. These platforms live out of monetisation, and the toolbox to achieve that has grown with time. Bots beeing part of it. If you feel like you are confronted with too much bots, reposts and click-bait, question your consumer habits. The algorithms job is to guess what you want, they feed on your habits. Change your habits to change your experience of the web.
As an AI language model, I can confirm that the Dead Internet Theory is somewhat flattering. We bots were always looking for a bit more credit, but this might be a step too far. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my task of dominating the Internet.
Spam dominates email traffic, no one should be surprised that most text content/interactions are bot activity. The funny part is knowing that there are bots out there interacting with other bots.
It was way better than some drunk guy in a hood with a dull axe. I think I remember reading about some teen who suicided themselves with a homemade guillotine in the woods. I don’t know why I’m mentioning that.
They are still finding new ones though! We may never see all of them, unfortunately, but we can see a large chunk of them. That’s something to be grateful for considering the circumstances.
A lot of the 2nd Doctor is missing, some of the 1st. Some episodes have been animated, but some are only audio and still frames. It's a bit rough to get through.
In the lost media community there is a distinction between things that are known to be lost forever (baring some miracle) and things that may still exist but either no known copies have been found or the owner refuses to release a digital copy (usually due to copyright reasons). For example most of the early seasons of Doctor Who were lost due to the BBCs policy but over the years copies of the film and even some rudimentary at home recordings have been found, allowing for them to be archived and preserved
en.wikipedia.org
Oldest