Some alternative ways to look at "Dead Internet Theory", perspectives different from analysis of individual bot numbers in the article. 1) Historical analogy.

Some alternative ways to look at "Dead Internet Theory", perspectives different from analysis of individual bot numbers in the article. 1) Historical analogy. Email for socialization in the 90s was popular and still has corporate support for socializing and passing documents despite the rise of Slack etc in software development focused companies. Email is now culturally dead for the general public other than hundreds of spam per day and dozens of semi-legit corporate semi-spam and a couple bills and formal notifications and report delivery per day. Email is no longer sent by humans, in general. On legacy social media, the bots (just like email spam) will never, ever, go away as long as the protocol exists. I would assume NNTP protocol is still being spammed, LOL. So the ratio of bot to human traffic for legacy social media either already does or soon will resemble the ratios for legacy email. 2) IRL use. You can see some of this in social media; as per my recent high school reunion a couple weeks ago, Facebook use follows an extreme power law where about 1% of my graduating class generates about 99% of the traffic and for the majority of my graduating class, Facebook is no longer a viable communication media, joining MySpace and such in the dustbin of history. Media does not die suddenly and completely like industry, Facebook will never look like the shutdown of the Oldsmobile brand. It will look like legacy TV. Historically in the 70s TV was culturally relevant and dominant and some TV shows like MASH were viewed by over a third of the population. Legacy TV is now culturally dead and irrelevant and a wild success might break 1% viewership, more importantly that form of media is considered culturally irrelevant by 99% of the population. Social media is on the cusp of irrelevancy. Ten years ago your normal non-technical relatives used Facebook, it seems like they all did. Now? Not so much. Social media will eventually probably be looked at as the "CB" of the 2010s. Note that 95% of the people in the "CB industry" in the 1970s got fired, but CBs are still actively used by rural truckers at warehouses and so forth, communications media never entirely goes away. Amateur Radio operators will never entirely stop using Morse Code even if the entire rest of the world has abandoned it; that's technologically cool and nifty, but note that learning Morse does not guarantee you a lifelong job as a telegrapher anymore as of 2022. 3) Social forces. Note that dying media always goes political extremist during its collapse, historically. No dead media format ever flipped the lightswitch off on balanced moderation, there's always the desire to court the true believers near the bottom of the downslope. Some social media sites are 100% biased hyper-censored single party political propaganda at this point. I'm not arguing that hyper-extremism in general, or the specific side that took over "big tech social media" is either good or bad, but I am arguing that the takeover itself by extremists is by itself a STRONG indicator of collapse. Soon social media will be like the editorial page of legacy newspapers, 100% devout, and utterly ignored and irrelevant and powerless. This fits in with dead internet theory in that extremism always pushes out the normal people, resulting in nothing left but empty echo chambers where what little is still permitted has already been said a million times and everything not already said will result in being cancelled, so humans post nothing, but bot traffic is constant (sounds like Reddit?)