“The “Dead Internet Theory” is a concept suggesting that the internet has largely been abandoned by humans and replaced by non-human activity. It posits that most online content, interactions, and engagement metrics are driven by bots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, creating the illusion of a vibrant, human-driven web.”
I never agreed with it. Yes there’s bots on the internet, but people are here too. The majority of lemmy is people, not bots. User facing websites are people, there’d be no reason to have bots post things just so other bots can see it. If that was the purpose, websites would just spew json formatted content around instead of someone building intricate websites full of css and shitty javascript.
There is a whole different internet though. One with devices like sensors, connecting to servers and posting numbers into databases. Automated code connecting everywhere for data aggregation. There’s also everything other than HTTP.
The theory doesn’t state there are no people on the internet, just that the majority of the internet is bot. Those bots are not created by the websites, but created by people who want to earn money farming content, manipulate people or just be annoying.
The people are of course still there, but they are largely relegated to engaging like people did with television. There’s some human content and a whole lot of generated content and a key thing about “internet” was that it was a big bidirectional thing where people put content out as much as they took it in.
People have been significantly pushed toward passive engagement with a corporate curated internet instead of active engagement. That is the crux of this concept.