By 2018, less than 60% of web traffic was human & half of YouTube views were bots masquerading as people. This wild article is about how much of the Internet is fake. (Spoiler: A lot.)
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By 2018, less than 60% of web traffic was human & half of YouTube views were bots masquerading as people. This wild article is about how much of the Internet is fake. (Spoiler: A lot.)
Miriam Boosh
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Albert Cardona
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •The list of web crawler bots I "deny" in my robots.txt is long. Now if only bots respected thatβI suspect many don't.
My website further requires a rewrite rule in its .htaccess file to prevent websites from reusing the images I host for their own purposes, as if my blog was an image server. While technically possible, it's unethical to consume someone else's storage and bandwidth without notice or agreement.
It's the wild west out here in the world wide web.
skua
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Boris Schapira (Pro)
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •LiverpoolWiz
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Ariaflame
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •sp
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •MugsysRapSheet Blog βοΈ
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •The article is drawing a bad conclusion based on bad data. It is easy to spot "bots" as they don't "linger" after "clicking" links.
Their analysis of how much web traffic is "human" is akin to sending people into a maze to calculate "traffic", and then counting the walls as people b/c they are also inside the room.
gentlegardener
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •British Tech Guru
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •1. I have a blog and hits are greater than page views. Suspicious.
2. I advertised on AdWords and Facebook with many hits on the adverts... Enough that I got charged. Hits on the webpage I set up... Nil. I got charged for fakery. I didn't advertise on either again because there was apparent dishonesty from Google and Facebook.
3. I uploaded a 17 second short video on YouTube in error. I am not sure what went wrong but it should have uploaded as 28 seconds. That video almost instantly got 2000 views. Something fishy there. It's a clearly incomplete video and way more than the dozen or so views my videos normally get.
xs4me2
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Guido Stevens HAS MOVED
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •MJ Lee
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •John Hurley
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Fascinating article with worrying implications
Jasmine Hulwood's Books
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Beaver
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •jackhutton πΊπΈ
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •α«α΅ α£αͺα«α Rass Bariaw
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Mark Saltveit
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •SlightlyCyberpunk
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •soo...I keep seeing arguments regarding the current Gonsalez v Google case that these companies *must* be allowed to push dangerous and illegal content on people, because there's just so much content that they have no choice! But if over half the content and traffic is fake, and a significant portion of what is left is gonna be content farms like five minute crafts and AI generated garbage...well, maybe the only reason there's such an overwhelming amount of content is because the systems actively encourage posting complete garbage...
And if the algorithms optimize for clicks and ad revenue, and most of that is fake, then it's just bots optimizing for other bots. Should we really be fighting so hard to protect what must be entire server farms burning through literal tons of CO2 just for bots to appease other bots?Yet another reason it may not be the end of the world if these companies are actually held responsible for the content -- not merely hosting -- that they produce...
gavinisdie
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •JP Etcheber
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Aydin Kurt-Elli
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Elisheva Meira β‘οΈ π
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •this is so true
Laurence Ellis
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •Raven Onthill
in reply to Sheril Kirshenbaum • • •