I recently saw a reddit thread that was a repost, and every comment was a bot reposting the comments from the last time it was posted. And in the middle of that, there was like a single human commenting on it, not realizing he was intruding on a karma farming circle jerk filled with bots.

I'll try embedding the image, if it's too compressed to read I can upload it somewhere else:

i think that dead internet is another form of enshitification that's more common on platforms that are backed by significant financing. eg reddit, facebook, bluesky, etc.

anecdotally: your experience gets richer on social media if you avoid platforms that describe itself as "general interest" or with investors behind it since both have an interest in trying to attract as many people as possible rather than letting people's interest organically lead them to your platform; lemmy was a great example of this before the reddit enshitification.

significant portion of the content in my feeds appears to be AI-generated

On which platforms? For me it seems to be true on the big ones I still kind of use because of some other reasons like Facebook and Instagram, but the niche ones like Lemmy and Mastodon don't.

One exception of the big ones is YouTube, there seems to still be enough humans creating content so it still out weights the AI generated one.

I think the best way to make the Internet less sh*tty is to get away from Google search.

I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.

https://search.inetol.net/

It's also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:

https://searx.space/

There is still lots of cool stuff on the Internet. The key to finding it is to avoid search engines that have a financial incentives to point you at advertisers instead.

Nathan J. Robinson: The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free

Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don’t expect to get a print subscription to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.

But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free!

I believe people will still make spaces for themselves online. The bots and enshitification will follow whats popular, but if you keep it small, maybe they won't notice.

Gonna hand a large advantage to societies that don't allow this on their social media and regulate AI. Another do nothing: win situation for China for instance. Of course if your country is controlled by people who live off gouging away at societies this will be framed as an advantage, and good luck dissenting on the terms you used to believe were avenues to pressure the powerful.

I use piefed, mastodon, and pixelfed. The only AI stuff i see is the stuff i sought out on purpose. At least afaik.

I think it won’t be abandoned, but we have to find better ways of filtering out AI slop. There are already quite a few search engines with curated networks of personal sites.

Another option is we switch to a different protocol. But internet style networks are too useful for human communication to abandon, I think.