When I was younger the internet was a brighter place. Though, that may very well be just how I remember it. Nostalgia always makes things feel warmer than they actually were. The days where an update to Internet Explorer would take half a day to download. You had Geocities, AngelFire and Myspace that kicked off what we would later call "social media". It was our first exposure to HTML and CSS.. Building our web pages from scratch. Sure, "ads" were a thing on each of those sites. But they felt less predatory of people's time.. Less politically motivated.. And they all shared a similar sentiment around "Don't be evil".. A mantra that years later Google would remove from their own policy. Computer security was a niche back then. Most of us didn't think twice about it.
Where am I going with this? Well, the internet feels like a much darker place. There's a lot more you need to be aware of. Computer security threats, fraudsters, online predators and so on. But that's not what I'm getting at. Enter the dark forest.
Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet, because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay quiet.
There are millions of bots generating fake engagement. It's hard to go online and look at anything without scrutiny. Did a real person say that? Is that photo or video real? What is real anymore? The humans are quiet, or lost in the noise.
This idea is also captured in the theory of the dead internet. Bots and AI-driven automation will further seek to influence social media and algorithmic feeds across Twitter, YouTube and TikTok. Influence to push political, financial or other motivations. We're already starting to see the shift where human engagement is becoming more rare, not gone, just deeper in the layers of the forest. If I scroll through my YouTube feed right now.. More than half of those shorts are AI-generated.
It makes me think about how we, as developers and builders, can find ways to bring authentic users out of the forest and promote real engagement without AI automation and political manipulation in the way.