Video download link | md5sum ce04fc38f18242215b166df259b3df15 WWW is Increasingly Fakes and Bots Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Contrary to popular misconceptions surrounding a Web 'monoculture' (therein exists a Web browser monoculture too; many used to equate the Internet with the Web and with the "Blue E"... and now Chrome), there's a lot of fakes, lots of bot activity, and alternatives to the Web are worth exploring

THERE is this seemingly harmless assumption that the Web will be good, but harmless assumptions can become increasingly harmful. For instance, to assume that the Web is the only way to receive recognition (on the Internet or offline) is nonsensical; it also relies on mostly false metrics.

You see, I can tell from experience that a ton of Web traffic is bots; that's just how it is because of get-rich-fast companies (schemes/scams) that scan millions of sites and have little of actual value to show for it. From Webmasters' point of view, this is mostly a nuisance and an expensive waste; unless the bots are Google's, which might in turn send some traffic (search referrals), it's likely CPU (power) and bandwidth down the drain. This isn't an endorsement of Google, it's just that it's estimated to command over 92% of search traffic. No other company comes even close, unless your site is predominantly Chinese or Russian.

"...unless the bots are Google's, which might in turn send some traffic (search referrals), it's likely CPU (power) and bandwidth down the drain."But there's an even deeper issue when one considers social control media and 'attention whores' -- pardon the crude term -- who are willing to either pay to boost numbers or to create a clique of clickers -- people who help each other fake "popularity" (at great expense to their time; such mutual clicking arrangements -- whether implicit or explicit -- are utterly pointless and of no benfit to ego). In the animation above (so-called 'poster' of the video) I'm showing my long-inactive Twitter account being mysteriously boosted when Elon Musk pretended to be buying it; basically, Twitter was faking numbers [1, 2] to "look big" and similarly in YouTube there are channels that spend money to fake their popularity. I recently gave SPAMnil's example; he is almost certainly deploying or paying to deploy bots to raise the perceived (faked) popularity of his videos. Here's Mr. "exceptionally well-connected" "filmmaker" where the bots don't pass:



Imagine that the Linux Foundation wastes its money on this junk while laying off all the actual journalists! Priorities...

Gemini might not "look" big, but it is growing quite rapidly. Also, it doesn't have companies like Gulag (Google) 'DDoSing' your platform 24/7 for "over a year". With the Web, many pages have huge computational overhead, both at the server and client side. That's bad for the planet. Generating and transmitting primarily textual pages should not be so expensive. ⬆