The Net (Internet), Including the World Wide Web, is Full or 'Fake' or 'Trash' (Bot) Traffic and We're All Paying the Price, Including in Hosting Bills
ONE month ago we moved to a nearby (UK-based) server (finally consolidating 6 or 7 containers and VMs!) and now we have about 99% of the Web pages restored as static, i.e. not dependent on PHP or some back-end database to "generate". Server load at the moment is 0.05 (no kidding!) and that's in spite of this site serving about 300,000 requests yesterday and sharing space with Tux Machines, which exceeds these traffic levels.
There is an unspoken/suppressed problem, however, or barely-spoken-about problem that is bots (no, not only Twitter came to realise this). "With 50% of all traffic now being bots," says this promotional new puff piece about Barracuda Networks Inc., "bad bots contribute to 30% of all traffic, although it’s noted in the report that the 30% figure is down, as bad bots had previously represented 39% in 2021."
That's still way to much and many of these bots generate the worst kind of traffic or the most CPU/RAM demanding traffic, imperiling sites that have databases and have to do a lot of computation in order to serve a request. This slows down legitimate users and raises operational costs. It's worth mentioning that bots are also somewhat of a problem in Gemini, as depending on the capsule it is possible that the lion's share of traffic is originating in some people's crawler/experiments. There is no simple solution to this problem (unoptimised database queries likely doomed Digg.com, which became far too slow as the site grew), but going static is definitely a step in the right direction. All sorts of gimmicks like view counters aren't worth the complexity they bring with them.
It's worth bearing in mind that many so-called 'Internet companies' aren't just losing loads of money (Clownflare, Spotify, Twitter and many more) but also faking their reach; some took that to the extreme (see screenshots below), a bit like Theranos...
To quote the New York Times:
The promise of five million customers, 6,000 schoolsSo what could JPMorgan have seen in the company?
Clearly, it liked Ms. Javice. In fact, the bank planned to pay her a $20 million retention fee if she stuck around for a stretch of time after the merger closed.
If JPMorgan wanted a pipeline of soon-to-be-educated young adults, it was paying $35 per name — $175 million divided by those five million customers. To pay that much, it had to have a lot of confidence that its marketing team would be able to persuade Frank customers to do business with the bank and stick with it for decades.
Guess how many of these "millions" were just fakes. This is fraud and she has been subjected to scrutiny ("Former Forbes '30 Under 30' start-up CEO accused of $175M fraud scheme against JP Morgan Chase"), including charges of fraud. To quote Quinn Owen and Lisa Sivertsen at ABC News: "Both federal prosecutors and the SEC accused Javice of defrauding JPMorgan into believing Frank had 4.25 million users, when in reality the number was less than 300,000."
Some companies sell fake traffic, helping to defraud people for misleading valuations. This includes Microsoft. █
