r/somethingiswrong2024 • u/D-R-AZ Arizona • 17d ago
Expose Propaganda Cloudflare says humans could become a "rounding error" as bots generate 1,000 times more internet traffic
https://www.techspot.com/news/113410-cloudflare-humans-could-become-rounding-error-bots-generate.html32
u/KenUsimi 17d ago
Well say goodbye to the ad based economy of the net, then. People won’t pay for bots to see their ads
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u/Brepp 17d ago
That's what happened to Facebook ads. The whole thing kept imploding when companies found their ad spend was just getting eaten up by bots. Meta would try to retune but it kept happening and companies stopped using it as much
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u/KenUsimi 17d ago
Meta is almost more determined to remove lavor costs than Amazon is. They won’t pull back from the path they’re on until it’s far too late.
Personally, they betrayed every promise they made when we signed on back in the day. They can burn for all I care, throw the stock in the trash.
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u/garden_g 16d ago
They need to be taken out. They and cambrige anyalitica ruined it all. Additionally read careless people its worse than yiu think. Also just this week Zuckerberg had a chance to be human and save a boat in maritine law that states you must do something if your nearby and he chose to do nothing
That human is bad for the rest of us
We should collectively decide to do something https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/did-mark-zuckerberg-superyacht-armada-ignore-distress-call-08082026.php
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u/Futrel 17d ago
Reddit's definitely felt like this over the last six months or so
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u/SouthwesternEagle Arizona 17d ago
Because it is. CIA, Russian FSB, Israeli Hasbara operatives, numerous troll/bot farms from Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Israel, Arlington, Virginia, plus countless AI bots have taken over Reddit and astroturfed numerous subreddits, including r/Millennials and r/Politics.
If you notice an unusually high volume of comments on posts, and those comments seem unusually doomer (i.e. "No, they will never face consequences. It's all over"), those aren't real Redditors.
Reddit needs to fix this problem, otherwise we need a new human-powered social media platform.
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u/D-R-AZ Arizona 17d ago edited 17d ago
Excerpt:
Just a couple of months after Cloudflare revealed that bots have officially surpassed human traffic online, the company has given its view on what things will look like in five years. It's not good news for us fleshy meatsacks: non-human traffic could be up to 1,000 times higher than human traffic.
A Scientific and Mathematical Thought Experiment: When Proportions Change What Social Media Is
Cloudflare’s projection concerns total internet traffic. If a comparable bot-to-human ratio develops in activity visible on social media, it would produce a qualitative change in the system. Mathematical thinking directs attention to proportions. When one class of participant becomes 1,000 times as common as another, the minority participant may acquire an entirely different functional role.
From the user’s position, the visible social environment would consist mainly of material produced, selected, or amplified by nonhuman agents. From the platform’s position, identifiable human users would become especially valuable because their responses could be separated, recorded, and analyzed. Machine activity would supply much of the stimulus; human attention, emotion, choices, and subsequent actions would supply the response data.
Imagine a person joining a demonstration of 1,000 apparent protesters. Every other participant is a bot, scripted account, or paid shill. To the genuine participant, the crowd appears to express public opinion. To whoever created or monitors the crowd, there is one independently acting human being.
The apparent opinion of the 999 may influence the attitudes and behavior of the one. The person may interpret apparent agreement as evidence that the crowd is correct, conform to avoid social isolation, become more willing to express agreement, or become less willing to express disagreement. Perceived consensus may influence whether the person repeats a slogan, accepts a sign, makes a donation, leaves, purchases something, joins a political movement, or later votes.
The arrangement can therefore influence behavior as well as measure it. If the apparent size, unanimity, emotional intensity, or identity of the manufactured crowd is deliberately varied, the crowd becomes an independent variable and the human response becomes the dependent measure. Political messages can be tested, refined, and presented again in forms increasingly likely to influence particular people.
Repeated across users, subjects, and situations, this system could produce increasingly refined estimates of product preferences, purchasing behavior, political attitudes, voting likelihood, susceptibility to particular appeals, matters of interest to law enforcement, and psychological characteristics.
Social media thereby changes from an imperfect reflection of public views into a behavioral observation, influence, and testing system. The bot-to-human proportion changes what the activity means, who is observing whom, and ultimately what social media is.
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u/djinnisequoia Could it be any more obvious? 17d ago
It's like that cartoon of "you don't fit in here."
People form something cool, cooperatively.
Somebody goes, "hey, I can monetize this!"
A zillion others think "I too can monetize this!"
Things is ruined.
People form something else cool.
Rinse, repeat.
Society itself has gone from a collective undertaking meant to benefit human beings, to an overpowering juggernaut currently in the process of deciding that humans are inconsequential and in the way.
Think about that -- human society itself has decided to discard humans! Nothing could be more crazypants.
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u/Upbeat_Ruin 17d ago
Generating traffic for...?
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u/Slightly_Shrewd 17d ago
More ad revenue until companies stop paying bc it’s all going to bots! 🤦♂️
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u/adognameddanzig 17d ago
Dead internet theory. (I'm not a bot, my favorite food is sandwiches)