The Internet is Becoming Dead or a Zombie
Yesterday this site and the sister site served about 1.5 million Web hits, which may sound like a lot until one realises many were just bots and those hits were spread across about 300,000 pages, maybe more. The latter point makes it hard to set up effective caching.
The Web is becoming very much polluted with garbage. A lot of traffic isn't organic, it's just synthetic and bot-driven, which means running sites can get very expensive and labour-intensive.
It seems unlikely that the Web will become "human majority" again; our Gemini Edition also gets hit a lot by bots, and it's anything but trivial to distinguish humans from bots in Geminispace because headers contain very little information.
Perhaps it's not even a Web issue but a Net issue. The Internet is becoming like a giant botfarm.
Yesterday in YouTube I saw a video of an ad (about 10 seconds long) that claimed to have over half a million views but had no comments and only 2 "likes". Obviously those views were therefore fake and likely paid-for (bogus popularity). █