Too Much of Today's Web is Fake, Not Just Fake News
Far too much junk going through wires (or wirelessly)
As noted earlier, a lot of the "engagement" on today's Web is bots. To give an example - going a little bit beyond the example we gave earlier - many YouTube channels and various social control media platforms are broadcasting false metrics. We used to give many examples of that from clickfraud Spamnil. Here it is right now:
Only about a handful of people watch his videos (probably him and the "guest", maybe their parents). A day later or days later a swarm of bots will game these numbers to make it seem like hundreds or even thousands of people watch these videos (5 view in 12 hours can become 500 only a day later). Well, clickfraud Spamnil is basically a charlatan and fraud, just like the people who run the Linux Foundation (whose palm he eats from) and who destroyed Linux.com by making/reinventing it as a slopfarm.
This dire state of the Web isn't improving; over time more people are compelled to similarly cheat (with slop, fake metrics etc.) and as a result it gets more expensive to run sites, platforms and so on. Then they adopt bloated JavaScript, in a futile or rather weak effort to curb bots, rendering the overall experience a lot more painful to actual users.
We cannot feel optimistic about the Web. Almost all Web usage of actual humans comes from Chrome (various metrics and analytics say ~70% for Google Chrome and the other 30% is mostly 'clones' of it) and most Web usage comes from bots, i.e. it is a pure nuisance, a digital parasite.
Fake news (or synthesised garbage the media wrongly calls "AI" and asserts to be "intelligent") is a real problem, but it is not the only problem. Fake traffic is also a big problem and it cannot be solved easily. Trying to add "challenges" to test if one is truly human is bad for the environment and a barrier acting against access (more so for people with disabilities). Demanding that people log in with an E-mail address (or even phone number) is an impediment to privacy and hence - by extension - to human dignity.
We'll continue to advocate for adoption of Gemini Protocol, seeing that slop is very scarce in Geminispace and there are no "metrics" to fake. People read genuine stuff and get stuff done there; they don't click on lots of worthless junk or solve "challenges"; this is what the Web used to be like. █