“The internet is now mostly machines talking to other machines, with the human users as the audience product.”
The original Dead Internet Theory was a fringe joke about how nobody you talk to online is real. Three years into the LLM boom, the joke is the operating reality. Most of the comments on most of the threads are generated. Most of the social media posts are generated. The traffic patterns favor the bots because the bots optimize against the algorithms the humans cannot keep up with. The theory is not a theory anymore.