Dead Internet Theory
Jan 03, 2025 at 10:03AM
Dead internet theory is a theory that the internet as we had gotten to know it is starting to die out. Some consider it a conspiracy theory due to them not noticing some signs that it could be true. It is safe to say that after the last couple of months, I’ve noticed enough signs to be a believer myself. Here’s why:
Gradual Disappearance
Whether it’s just a function of social media sites being easy and free, the art of having a personal website is disappearing, slowly but surely. I think there’s also another factor at play here too.
The fact that it is becoming more difficult to tailor personal websites and blogs to search engines. Pretty much every search you make, the results are prioritized to the main 5 big tech websites.
This past March, was the first time ever that doing a search for my business’s name would show its Facebook page over the site I made for my business. And it seems to do that on and off.
This prioritization is making it less of a need for businesses to hire a web developer, unless they plan on taking on eCommerce moreso than what the big tech social media allows. For this reason I think many people who would normally own a blog to put their ideas out there are just going to microblog on a platform like X or Facebook.
Even some staples of knowledge I’ve found and bookmarked over the years have disappeared. Either redirecting to a domain parking page or other error screen.
Adpocalypse
Over the past few years advertisements have gotten worse and worse. With Amazon now putting ads on Prime TV content and forcing users to pay even more for ad-free content. People are getting sick of advertisements.
One method that us site owners use to get paid for some of our content is employing ads from Google’s Adsense or another type of ad network. The issue with it is some of the ads really aren’t relevant to the content and others are straight up malware/scams.
It’s up to the website owner to go in daily and filter the ads. It’s a responsibility Google and others refuse to take. As Chris Titus demonstrates in this video:
So website owners are faced with a four-way conundrum or a various combo of the three:
- Risk it with ads - Either trying to filter them or just leaving visitors to the wolves, there’s always some degree of risk that users may stumble into a scam or malware, then associate that negative experience with said website, reducing visitors and patrons over time.
- Shilling own merch - Another way site owners could make money is by making and selling their own merchandise. The issue with that, is it’s usually not an option for smaller scale site owners.
- Affiliate marketing - The third way to make money off of a site would be affiliate marketing. Where the site owner can sign up with specific companies and have a choice in the products they advertise. They then can get a cut of the sales their links generate for said affiliate.
- Be okay with not making money - And the fourth option is just not making money off of their site at all, and being okay with that. Just operating it out of a desire to express oneself and possibly vanity. That’s where I’m at, not seriously considering affiliates, at least not yet. And there’s no way in hell I’m putting ad-network code on my site that I don’t have direct control over.
The site/blog owners who pick 1 are starting to lose patrons because the negative connotation that the ads bring to the people browsing the site. Which is one big reason why I avoid cooking sites in general, they’ve become so riddled with ads it’s sometimes difficult to figure out which information is associated with the recipe and which is just an ad.
Costs
With the buyout and collapse of Geocities and the fact that Neocities hasn’t gotten as much traction, it’s now more expensive for people to host a website if they don’t know where to look.
Currently I’m hosting this one on the cheapest Linode VPS I can. Which works good, but requires some knowledge on how to setup a webserver and a secure way to upload files to it.
Bot Activity
In my post about how I plan on reducing my usage of Facebook, I pointed out that there seems to be a market for phished Facebook accounts. Even though against my original criticism, Facebook seems to be slowing down the traffic of these bot (originally legitimate) accounts, I still hear of people losing various accounts to phishers.
One of the uses hackers/phishers have for social media accounts, is using them for various bots. And at least half the people I know are on their second or third account due to their first ones being phished. I feel that this problem will continue for a while even if social media platforms try to thwart it, because it’s hard to police without substantial manpower.
I feel like content moderation AI’s have vast potential but shouldn’t be relied upon for a sole means of moderation until they’re trained on enough moderation cases to be 95-99% accurate. Because lately I have seen Facebook’s AI moderator ban one of my friends for 3 weeks, over him listing a PC steering wheel controller for sale on Facebook Marketplace; because it took that long to get human eyes on the case.
Also to note, bot activity on X is still a thing despite Elon’s zealous fixation on going after the bots. It’s just one of those issues that can be very challenging because bot creators are getting more and more crafty. And if they can’t bot it, they’ll just hire a handful of poor people to spam out what they want to spam anyway.
Light at the end of the tunnel
There is potential that this trend can reverse its course, if users stop growing blind to the issues above. Some creators are already starting to branch out from doing solely social media content. One of them to note is NetworkChuck, a prominent Youtube creator who I enjoy watching, who recently launched his own blog; which is built using Hugo too, even though he’s using an off the shelf theme instead of custom layouts like this site is made from.
Maybe we’ll see the tides turn back in favor of us masochists who maintain our own sites.
I do plan on putting comments on here somewhat soon, so if that happens, you’ll see a comments section below; I’d be curious to see what the viewers think.