Bots don't generate money you dough brains.
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
582 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
87096 readers
6712 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
why focus on money? what about culture, humanity, and actual interesting interaction between humans?
ah, I forgot humanity have devolved into beings of statistics. Leaving feelings, positive long term planning, and religion behind.
I believe it is an attempt to use an argument that they will care about. You could write a brilliant piece about how that many bots hurt culture and society but if the ones you want to convince don't gaf about either of those, they probably won't even read what you have to say, let alone change anything because of it.
Or, more likely, they won't even see anything here, at which point that comment becomes more of a "they aren't even very good at what they want to be good at".
Like from my pov, the top of the corporate world doesn't just not care about those things but is actively trying to destroy them because they think they'll do better in a world where none of those things are as they currently are.
Bots don't do that either.
People are just going to get sick of the Internet, if they haven't already, and start to look at it like a necessary evil they have to use to do certain things instead of what it once was which was fun and exciting. It's sad.
A much larger segment of people than you think are already off. You just don't hear about them, because, well, they aren't online. Lmao
Yep. The internet is becoming what a mailbox in real life is. An abused gateway that has a narrow set of legitimate uses.
load more comments
(3 replies)
We will have private mesh nets
Overlay networks are also feasable.
funded by whom? (legitimate question)
Currently private users and enthusiasts. As networks grow, there will probably be universities joining. Eventually corporations will start marketing plug and play equipment while selling access to server space and long distance connections. Other businesses will join and finance their services by selling subscriptions, advertising, and user data. Various government agencies will add hardware they can also use to track traffic. Someone will inevitably bring in bots, AI models, and internet connected devices. After that someone will coin the term “dead mesh network theory” and all the nerdlings will start developing the next knitted network or something.
The catalyst there is businesses (and to a degree governments).
I used to pay attention to my physical mail. Then it was all "junk mail" and the signal-to-noise ratio got hard to manage.
I migrated the important stuff to "electronic mail", where I had a curated list of people and entities that sent me items, so I could focus on things that were important. Then my address/mailbox became common knowledge and that filled with "spam".
I started using SMS/text for the important stuff. But that also became a common place to send me stuff I didn't care about, so I used specific apps on my phone that had permission to notify me when something needed attention, and now my phone gives me so many notifications I just ignore them all.
Our attention is the prize, and it won't matter where our attention goes: The businesses will follow.
The same will hold true for connectivity. If the current internet becomes a wasteland and we migrate to Mesh, then it's only a matter of time before corporate interests take that over too; then knitted, or fabric, or the glob.
The solution will be protections for personal identity and privacy, which have been and will be fought tooth-and-nail by the companies because they want that info so they can be where our attention is so they can make profit. I think we can also fight the profit motive, but that'll be harder than getting protections in law... so small steps.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'm looking forward to an open mesh outside the realm of government and corporate control
Their was a video about how to start building something like that, I'll edit this with a link once I get back home from work.
awesome, then we can remove all the ads, no? because bots don't purchase things, no?
Last year, you’d be correct. This year, bots DO purchase things. They also download and run things. Some marketers have gotten wise and have adjusted SEO and general product advertising to appeal to bots.
Where did we go wrong?
In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. – Some Hoopy Frood
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(11 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(14 replies)
Guess I'll just have to hang out with humans in the physical world.
You won't be able to tell which of your neighbours was replaced by a metal mimic, and got shipped off to the Soylent factory.
Peter Thiel did mention humans will end up like horses, going to the glue factory.
load more comments
(4 replies)
The weirdest part won’t be bots outnumbering humans: It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement. … Meanwhile three actual humans are somewhere wondering why the internet suddenly feels so empty.
It’ll be bots writing articles for bots, bots summarising them for other bots, bots commenting underneath, and bots measuring the engagement.
load more comments
(37 replies)
I'm reminded of the episode of TNG where they trapped Moriarity in a simulation so he would think he had taken over the ship.
Maybe we can just have an internet just for billionaires where they have AI produce internet content so they can advertise useless AI products to AI bots run by other billionaires while the rest of us go on with our normal lives in the real world?
load more comments
(5 replies)
There's also the fact that an internet full of bots, AI slop, and privacy risks is making more people pull away from the online world. In our poll, 97% of people said the internet today was a hellscape compared to its early days, and it looks like things are only going to get worse.
Looks like the cure is inherent in the disease. Anyone else remember the early 90s when Usenet was just text-based fun and then some motherfucker thought it was a grand idea to run ads? I do, and it's been downhill ever since.
It's sad that it has come to this, but as usual a handful of greedy fuckers have ruined it for the rest of us. (My personal opinion is that big tech could have arrested this downhill slide at any point, even from back in the first days of email spam, but have chosen to monetize it every step of the way instead.)
Real humans are already individually opting out, one by one, as we each personally get sick of the slop and realize it's just not helping anymore. For myself I'm only on intermittently, I've ditched all social media, Lemmy is all I participate in regularly now beyond the odd comment here and there, and that seems about right for me at this time.
I adjust it regularly, often just by going offline for days, but I had to see the problem before I could change it. I think that's where a lot of people are, just now seeing it for the first time as a real problem affecting their quality of life directly.
But like any other addiction, the point of turning is different for everyone. These fuckers on the other end, filling everything with slop and running bots without end, are just speeding it all up.
load more comments
(9 replies)
World governments will be delighted to find that they've driven their populations off of the internet. As much as they'll hate being engaged in 24/7 automated cyber warfare to stop their power plants exploding.
No. Governments love the internet. It keeps people distracted.
It was keeping them distracted, until it started either letting them foment or driving them insane. They'd prefer you just consume media and leave them to their business, these days.
Hosting shit has become too expensive, and the ads will generate less and less revenue, as it's mostly bots generating clicks and views. This is changing the internet at an incredible pace.
The worst is that any attempt to create a place free of bots will only become a target for LLM companies to gather clean training data.
load more comments
(14 replies)
already there mate.
Locally we have been setting up some mesh systems. Its been fun work. One of the best things about it is:
- All traffic is human.
- No survalance
Its in the early phases but its been a sucess so far.
load more comments
(5 replies)
I don't host things on the open internet anymore. I have a small set of services I host for a group of friends and family and I set them up with tailscale.
On the flip side, I've been constantly frustrated because every time I have an idea for some little quality of life tool that involves pulling data from a site I would normally have to browse to directly, I can't do it because everything is captcha'd to all hell.
I think http/https is dead at this point.
load more comments
(6 replies)
view more: next ›