Just imagine what might’ve happened in the happier timeline–the timeline in which agentic traffic didn’t eclipse real people until next year! We could’ve built such a better, more-beautiful world. We were so damn close.
I used to be able to browse the web happily with JS disabled. It started to get worse about 10 years ago and really bad about 6 years ago and EXTREMELY bad over the past year or two.
And I get it, it’s because of all the scrapers constantly fucking everything up and needing to be blocked. But still. The internet is unusable. All so the likes of Gemini or Claude or Deepseek can generate unlimited amounts of spam and slop.
It’s not because of the scrapers though. It’s probably because JavaScript is needed to make the page interactive in most cases. Almost everything is a single page web app now you can’t do that without JavaScript.
People could make old style sites where there is a full page reload every time you click a link but they aren’t as nice.
They arent as nice? You and I have very different tastes
It’s also because of the scrapers.
Without javascript, you can’t realistically do the “prove you are human bits”, which I seem to have to do many times a day this year.
Anubis did implement a ‘No-JS’ challenge, but it’s super trivial for scrapers to overcome. They just have to parse the refresh tag and retry after the specified interval. Not even ‘proof of work’, but increasingly the proof of work isn’t considered sufficient and many sites are back to the captcha family of bullshit.
I went to a Microsoft site to fill out a form to register for a 2 two conference. My CPU shot up to 100 percent. The task manager told me that this was using a huge amount of computer for a ton of javascript running on a page that didn’t need any at all.
It is very abused for analytics, little is used to make a page “nice” anymore.
I tried no script for a few days but it was so frustrating that the majority of websites just flat out didn’t work I had to get rid of it.
you can set permanent rules. Its very much active protection as in you have to actively fiddle with it when going to new sites, which also makes you more aware how much stuff they are running. So many sites load like 20 different things but need only 1 or 2 to function flawlessly.
Imo, it would be scary to browse without noscript, even with ublock on. For me its kind of like first line of defence, with ublock I can pretty safely test out what is needed for website to work and what isnt without worrying too much. Everything being blocked by default makes it more safe and if some website turns out to be really bad, i can set it as untrusted so i remember it later too if it appears again or if i go there again because i forgot.
And if I get really annoyed with fiddling with some website i want to work and which doesnt seem that threatening, i just set it temporarily all allowed.
Cloudflare regularly treats me as a bot, making it difficult or sometimes impossible to access certain websites, so I’m not all that inclined to believe them here.
Are you behind avpn
This is interesting too, because in theory it would be in the best interest of cloudflare for that to be the general narrative. i.e “Look how many bots there are on the internet, you really need cloud flare” or however they’d advertise that.
Yeah this kinda fits into “CEO said a thing” journalism. Even if he’s correct — and intuitively it seems like he might be — people should ask for evidence. But our corporate press is useless and/or complicit and almost never asks a follow-up question.
Well goodbye the internet, what advertiser is going to pay anything if they know the majority of user are bots.
Hence the push for os level user identification and why the Zuck is behind the push.
Are advertisers absolutely necessary?
Few online platforms flourish without advertisers. Practically all our content on lemmy comes from sites with advertising.
I’m sure people would create content even if they didn’t make anything. They did in the past.
mmhmm, give us your top 10 Peertube reccomendations :)
Maybe advertisers are bots too?
Advertisers are essentially subsidizing many businesses. Costs are higher than you think and most products we enjoy are expensive.
Yes, there is FOSS, but you’re essentially fucking lucky that people that work on those want to do this from the passion they have. Most people don’t, and won’t, do shit like that for free. Hell, look at many here on the internet that want products for free and are unwilling to pay or even do minimal donations for things that they already like.
Like it or not, most people want to be fucking paid for their time and FOSS, as great as it can be, is not the norm for most talent. We can make counter arguments and hate on capitalism, but that is the reality, and until entire cultures change then this is what it is and advertisers are sort of necessary evil in most cases.
Even all those websites that are serving content illegally, like porn and game pirating sites, only can afford to stay up because of advertising.
My question is whether websites need to be owned by businesses.
No but the end of internet advertising will basically be the end of many internet professions that are already struggling. Like writers and editors. So only hobbyists and the lucky few who have enough fame to get paid via Patreon will be making certain websites.
Lots of FOSS developers are paid by companies. At least people working on the major projects.
Yes because people are cheap.
Not necessarily. Sometimes people just can’t afford to pay websites.
Literally everything on the internet is paid for by advertising. And without it every site you rely upon will either become a subscription service or simply disappear because it is expensive to run a website.
Why is it so expensive to run a website?
Scale.
Running a website is very cheap, like $5 a month
Running a huge website with millions of users is expensive
Also salaries. Like the people who make the content also need to get paid.
Because bandwidth isn’t free.
Server hosting - is my understanding. It takes a lot of resources to host a site.
They pay to run ads because it makes them look better for investors who are all stupid people who have inherited JUST enough money to keep them from from ever failing at making money. More ads mean more stock value.
That’s why there are MORE ads than ever even though the number of viewer-per-ad is plummeting.
Its just one more example of the infinite money printing machines that are about to break the world. All the obviously ruinous bad stuff that is being allowed to happen despite the constant warning sirens is tied to these runaway money printing schemes.
Maybe getting rid of those invasive ads is a good thing.
Wasn’t this already said about a decade ago.
yeah I honestly thought this point was reached long ago.
I saw on another thread here, let’s move off www and let the bots take it over.
thats kinda what this is. problem is no matter where we go we interface with machines which means machines can be instructed to interface by themselves. the only way to truly do it is to engage in meatspace.
Bulterian
prooper speling is for the somenoen else
This is my commander. 😢
Bots have now passed human traffic online
You’re 20 years too late buddy.
Human email has been a statistical anomaly since the 90s
At least somebody is reading my blog. Thanks, bots.
My blog used to receive direct traffic to various articles from search engines.
Now, 90% of hits are on the homepage with no search engine referral. I’ve blocked the bots in multiple ways, but they keep coming.
We successfully gave the internet schizophrenia
actually thier overmoderation, that destroyed the userbase. META, REDDIT both heavily banned users they cant datamined effectively(because API, PROXIES VPNs,etc), because they in an ironic twist think they are all bots, now its just all bots.
Anyone else having this annoying popup asking to allow ads making impossible to read the article?
Edit: nevermind, opened it with ironfox and clicked on read mode button or smth.
Bought a creality 3d printer. Every time I go to their site to read about a a feature or how to do something I get constantly bombarded with page pop over ads for their products while I’m trying to learn the features of my new printer. I guess if I got one of their cloud accounts then it might not happen but its annoying enough I never will. I don’t reward shit like that.
You already have. Shit like that drives conversion in the short term but it sacrifices usability and brand value. Managers love this shit because they can tell the board they made sales go up x% and then they’re off to ruin another business.
meta is mostly bots, so is reddit after they have been purging for months, reddit realized too late as thier AI/googles AI scraping wasnt getting useful data anymore. that is why they sorta laid off directly sitewide banning.
Can’t he see all that porn traffic?
The porn sites are usually blocklisted by AI companies because they don’t want their LLMs and image gens to generate porn.Except Grok
So, what’s holding us back from uploading random non-nsfw videos or pictures to porn sites and using the comment section there as our social media?
Didn’t that one math (or was it science?) YouTubers actually start doing this? If I recall, she was getting way more traffic on porn hub
Don’t know if it was more traffic but she made more.
Age verification. /s
“Are you 18+? yes/no”. Now the trick in hacking this security is to lie. Quite amazing that you can hack this using a political tool.
Saying no just gets you on the Trump pageant mailing list though
Nothing tbh, theres some good convos on pornhub and creators seem able to get a better cut
Now I kind of want to see a bot being trained on 100% porn images (amd 99% of them are at least 80% naked) in various situations and then order it to generate a human with clothes in an office setting.
Will it generate an office porn or the regular joe in an office? :Dthat sounds interesting tbh
AI porn is a thing in most non-PH sites, but it probably uses a different model?
except grok.
Dude! We said we wouldn’t completely fuck up the Internet until next year!
Until AFTER the big AI company IPOs, eh? Well, sucks to suck