Blogging on the Dead Internet

Reviewing this blog's numbers at the time of this writing (December 2025) I find that in 2023 and then again in 2024 my page view count exploded. The twelve-month December 2024-November 2025 period actually saw me get more page views than I got in all the preceding years between that point and the establishment of the blog way back in 2008. Indeed, during that twelve month period my better days saw me get more page views in a day than I got in just about any month before 2023, while in single months in 2024 I got more views than I previously received in whole multi-year periods.

Yet the evidences of actual humans being responsible for that explosion of traffic just aren't there. Comments? Cutting out the ever-more abundant spam unmistakable as anything else (like the comments completely irrelevant to what I wrote that contain links obviously intended to promote somebody else's web site, deleting which is a regular chore now) I'd say that, relative to the page views, they're down by more than ninety percent. Contrary to the glib, stupid claims about social media being magic for everyone online it was never a big source of views for this blog, but delivers even less now, while it is rarer than ever that I seem to get anything from backlinks anywhere. Meanwhile there is my data from Google's search engine, which accounts for only one of the ways in which traffic reaches this blog, but certainly where the overall Internet is concerned perhaps the most important. It seems these days that I am getting more "impressions" on Google, a multiple of what I was getting two years ago--but the ratio of clicks to impressions has plummeted such that I may be actually getting less clicks now than when I was getting only a fraction of the impressions I have been getting lately.

Why bring all this up? Because of the relevance of the hard empirical data I have summarized here for the argument over whether we are ever less likely to encounter, or be encountered by, an actual human being online in the way we so often used to do, and much, much more likely to meet the bots generating not just absolutely but relatively much, much more of the traffic online than before--which argument this data overwhelmingly supports. I also bring it up because that, in turn, has a good many implications, not the least of them that, if my experience is typical then one would imagine a great many persons becoming discouraged in the activity and giving up on it altogether.

Is there evidence for that? It seems to me that a great many bloggers I used to follow have long since cut back on their posting--bloggers who used to post something every couple of weeks now putting up a new post every half year or so. Or ceased to receive updates, or even disappeared altogether from the web (such that a good many blogs that used to be in the blogroll on the right side of this page have been deleted). Yet the information I have been able to come up with tells me that the number of blogs has not decreased. People are putting less effort into blogs--but there may be as much blogging as ever because they have artificial intelligence applications generating content for them, lowering the costs of producing "content," which keeps them at the game. In the process we have ended up with a situation in which an increasing proportion of blogging is machine-generated content produced for an audience that now overwhelmingly consists of . . . machines. Whether they are promoting a business, authors attempting to win an audience for their writing, enthusiasts merely trying to share an interest, this is not their intention, but it is the result, a situation where in place of what we once grandly called "the blogosphere" where millions of humans were saying their word to the world, what we have is in the main bots writing for other bots. In contrast with the more narrowly utilitarian web of essential services, and commerce, where real humans are constantly active, this side of the web seems ever closer to what we speak of when we refer to the "dead" Internet--all as the dead Internet seems to me to represent the death of something else, the desperate, doomed, hope that the Internet we got, for all its limitations compared with the Internet we should have had, democratizing the creation and distribution of "content" in some degree. As more and more people realize now, it hasn't, the oligarchs of Big Media in its various forms exercising ever more control over what people see, hear, read and believe, all as democracy--and freedom--and truth--are not only the last things on whatever passes with them for minds, but things they actively strive to eliminate from the world.