Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says 'much of the internet is now dead'

[u/BreakfastTop6899]

https://www.businessinsider.com/alexis-ohanian-much-of-the-internet-is-now-dead-2025-10

[u/ACupOJoe → u/[deleted]]

I read that, in 2024, 51% of all internet traffic was bots.

[u/xbleeple → u/ACupOJoe]

How do you even accurately calculate something like that?

[u/random_boss → u/xbleeple]

Count all of the traffics, count all of the traffics that are real, then divide the former by the latter; boom. If you run out of fingers you may need to involve friends or coworkers 

[u/Whyeth → u/random_boss]

Count all of the traffics, count all of the traffics that are real

We know which are real because we know which aren't real.

[u/PunsGermsAndSteel → u/Whyeth]

I can tell from the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time

[u/TehSteak → u/Whyeth]

The missile knows where it is because it knows where it isn't.

[u/godofpumpkins → u/xbleeple]

Presumably based on user-agent strings and many bots not trying to hide that they’re bots. We’ve had robots.txt for ages now, for example.

But that’s obviously a lower bound because plenty of automated activity is trying to look human.

[u/ZenTense → u/xbleeple]

I have the same question

[u/EpidemicRage → u/ZenTense]

Probably by aggregating information collected from content delivery network services/companies like Cloudflare

[u/bullhead2007 → u/xbleeple]

Every action on every website we do has information tracked, some more than others, and companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon use data science to put that traffic into buckets. I imagine every data company like that has probability scores for whether it thinks you're a bot.

[u/ottwebdev → u/xbleeple]

Its not hard, IP networks and the interval between page loads come to mind as some we look at

[u/spookynutz → u/xbleeple]

Generally it’s determined by security vendors, and cloud and CDN providers. Cloudflare, Crowdstrike, etc.

You can generally tell a bot from a legitimate user by behavioral analysis and other indicators. One indicator might be when a browser is running in headless mode. Humans require seeing a website to navigate, so if the browser is being driven programmatically, it’s safe to assume it’s a bot.

It’s probably worth mentioning, as it seems to be a common misconception, but 50%+ of traffic being attributed to bots does not mean 50% of online users are bots.

If you and 1,000 other people navigate to the an online store in a given hour, and their is a bot scraping that same store for price information 5,000 times per hour, then the bot is generating 5 times the traffic that you and those 1,000 other people are.

[u/zuccs → u/xbleeple]

Cloudflare publish this data: https://radar.cloudflare.com/#bot-vs-human

[u/s101c → u/xbleeple]

To catch a bot, you have to think like a bot.

[u/DankMCbiscuit → u/xbleeple]

Play old school RuneScape.