The Dead Internet Theory - Where is Everyone Hiding?

I’ve been online long enough to remember when the internet felt like a room. Not a marketplace. Not a casino. Not a billboard jungle humming with invisible machinery. An actual - busy - room.

Back in 2002, I’d post something - an article, a thought, a rant, a lesson - and within hours my inbox would begin to fill. Real names. Real questions. Real disagreements. Readers arguing with me. Readers thanking me. Readers sending me long, rambling life stories because something I wrote hit a nerve.

I needed staff, not to analyze traffic - but to answer real human beings. Now I look at my stats and it feels… kinda abstract. One article spikes hits into the thousands. Another barely twitches. There's no obvious pattern. No steady correlation between effort and response. No predictable feedback loop so that I can focus on what people need or want...

And the emails? These days mostly silence. Sales - yes. But conversation? Sparse.

So I start wondering what many long-time online creators must be quietly thinking: Is anyone actually here?

That’s where the so-called “Dead Internet Theory” creeps in. Let’s talk about it.

The Dead Internet Theory, in its most extreme form, suggests that a significant portion of online activity is no longer human. That much of the web - especially traffic, comments, social media engagement - is generated by bots, AI systems, automated scripts, and algorithmic amplification. That organic human interaction has been drowned out, or even replaced.

Now, as a literal claim - that the internet is mostly bots - veers into conspiracy territory. But as a metaphor? As a description of what it feels like to be a long-term content creator today? Well, it resonates. Because something has undeniably changed.

When I started online, the web was slower but more intimate. Blogs were hubs. Email lists were living communities. Search engines felt like librarians rather than gatekeepers. Social media hadn’t yet swallowed the open web. It's hard to imagine there was a time before social media - but it existed for many years during the late 90's and the first half of the 00's.

Traffic might have been smaller in those days - but at least it was sticky. Readers returned. They wrote back. We built relationships. The internet felt human-scaled. Today, by comparison, it feels industrial.

The shift didn’t happen overnight. It happened gradually, then all at once.

First came platform centralization. Instead of people browsing blogs directly, they began discovering content through platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, later TikTok. The open web became dependent on algorithmic distribution.

I no longer owned the doorway to my audience. I rented it. So it became harder to get organic visitors - and because social media doesn't want to lose visitors, they make their own feeds as sticky as possible.

Then came the algorithm arms race.

Platforms realized engagement could be engineered. Emotional content performed better than thoughtful content. Controversy spread faster than nuance. The feeds became optimized not for connection but for retention. And retention doesn’t require authenticity. It simply requires stimulation. And sometimes fake stimulation is enough.

Then came automation. Click farms. SEO manipulation. Engagement pods. Comment bots. Scrapers. Fake accounts inflating follower counts. Corporate content factories pumping out keyword-optimized articles at scale.

And now - AI systems capable of generating infinite text, infinite images, infinite comments. The signal-to-noise ratio has exploded. So when I check my blog stats and see randomness - that randomness may not be random at all.

Some of those “thousands of hits” could be crawlers. Aggregators. AI scrapers harvesting content for training datasets. Automated preview bots from social platforms. SEO scanners.

They register as visits. But they are not real readers. Meanwhile, human behavior has shifted in subtler ways. Attention is fragmented. People skim feeds rather than read essays. They save posts to “read later” and never do. They interact privately rather than publicly. They consume silently.

The internet hasn’t died. But it has gone quiet. There’s the difference.

I notice that interaction now often appears only around sales. That’s telling to me. Because what remains reliably human online is transactional behavior.

When someone spends money, that’s a human. When someone signs up intentionally, that’s a human. Everything else is increasingly ambiguous.

In the early web, content was at the center. Now distribution is at the center. If I don’t feed the algorithmic beast - frequent posting, short-form hooks, platform-native formatting - my thoughtful blog article may simply drift past unseen.

I'm fairly sure it’s not that readers don’t care. It’s that they probably just never see it. And when they do see it, they’re conditioned not to linger. This creates a psychological distortion for all of us creators.

You write something substantial. It gets modest engagement. You feel invisible. Then you post something light or reactive and it spikes. You start questioning your instincts. But the pattern isn’t necessarily about value. It’s about platform mechanics.

I think there’s another layer at work here too.

The early internet rewarded niche depth. Communities formed around specific interests. Mailing lists, forums, blogrolls.

Today’s internet rewards scale and velocity. It’s harder to build small, tight-knit public communities because conversation has migrated into private spaces - group chats, closed Discord servers, private Facebook groups, Patreon communities, subscriber-only channels. Public comment sections have thinned out. Not because people have stopped talking. But because they’ve retreated into controlled environments.

Part of this retreat is defensive. Online spaces became more hostile, more polarized. When every comment risks being screenshotted, amplified, or attacked, people choose silence.

So yes - some of the disappearance I feel is clearly human self-protection. But the bot presence is real too. Estimates suggest that a significant percentage of web traffic is now non-human. Search engine crawlers. Monitoring tools. Malicious scripts. Data harvesters. And now, AI agents that browse content autonomously.

The irony is striking. You build a blog to connect with readers. But AI systems may be reading it more consistently than humans. That can feel existential. Especially when I built my online life in an era where connection was the reward.

But here’s something I think is worth considering.

I think the early internet wasn’t necessarily more “alive.” It was just less crowded. There were fewer a lot creators. Fewer platforms. Fewer distractions. When someone found my blog in 2004, they might have had twenty tabs open. Now they no doubt have around two hundred.

I realize my competition isn’t other bloggers anymore. It’s streaming services. News feeds. Short-form video. Infinite scroll.

In actuality I'm probably not losing readers. I'm just competing with the entire attention economy. And the attention economy is engineered by design to fragment attention. That fragmentation is bound to produce randomness in stats.

An algorithm surfaces one post unexpectedly - there's a spike. Another sinks quietly - there's silence. It feels chaotic because it probably is chaotic. I built my online presence in a linear era. We now live in a nonlinear one. Okay, so where has all the interaction gone?

I accept a lot of it moved to social media. Some of it moved to private channels. Some of it was diluted by scale. Some of it was replaced by automation. And some of it is still there - but quieter.

There’s another psychological shift at play too.

In the early web, communication felt scarce. If someone emailed me, that was special. Today communication feels abundant and cheap. A comment is just one of thousands in a feed. The perceived value of individual interaction has dropped. People consume more and respond less.

But here’s the paradox. When I sell something and someone responds thoughtfully - that response is often deeper than the casual comments of old. The casual chatter may have diminished. But the committed engagement may actually be more meaningful.

Okay, I've experienced a filtering effect. The internet feels deader at the surface level. But the core interactions - the ones that involve intention - are still human. And in some ways, purer.

I suppose the Dead Internet Theory taps into something emotional. It reflects a loss of intimacy. A nostalgia for when the web felt somewhat handmade. When every site looked slightly different. When blog comments were conversations rather than drive-by reactions.

That world hasn’t vanished entirely. But it’s no longer the dominant layer.

We’re now living in a stratified internet. The surface layer is automated, algorithmic, optimized. The middle layer is platform-driven, competitive. The deeper layer - email lists, paid communities, long-form readers - remains human.

I built my career in the deeper layer. The surface has grown louder. The middle has grown more artificial. But I have to assume the deep layer still exists. It just doesn’t scream for attention like it used to.

While I'm on a roll, there’s something else worth acknowledging. I’ve been online for over two decades. That means I’ve evolved. And I guess my audience has evolved too.

Some readers from 2005 may simply not be online the way they once were. Life stages change behavior. Younger audiences inhabit different platforms. Part of what feels like disappearance may be a generational shift. The web didn’t die. It aged. And so did its users.

The Dead Internet Theory dramatizes the experience of disconnection. But what’s actually happening is structural transformation. The web is no longer primarily a conversation network. It’s now more of a distribution and monetization infrastructure. That doesn’t mean you can’t create meaningful connections. It means that if I want them, I have to build them deliberately.

Organic interaction as a default is gone. Intentional community is the new organic. To be honest though, that may actually align with my current stage better than the chaotic bombardment of the early years.

I don’t need thousands of emails a day anymore. I simply need the right readers - the people who become my students and mentees.

I don’t need noise. I need signal. The randomness in my stats may never resolve into neat patterns again. The algorithms are too complex. The ecosystem too volatile. But my lived experience isn’t imaginary.

Something shifted, yes. The web industrialized. Bots multiplied. AI entered the room - and the piano player stopped. The conversation dispersed. And creators like me who built in the handcrafted era feel the contrast most acutely.

I suppose the question isn’t actually whether the internet is dead. It’s what layer I choose to operate in. If I measure vitality by comment counts and raw hits, I’ll feel the emptiness. But perhaps if I measure vitality by meaningful responses, mentorships, sales aligned with trust, long-term students, sustained readership - the pulse is still there.

It’s just deeper. And perhaps more honest.

The early internet rewarded volume of interaction. The current one rewards resilience. I’ve already adapted once - from pre-social web to platform era. 

Now we’re in the AI-amplified phase. It’s noisier, but more synthetic.

In the end, I'm convinced human beings still crave depth. That hasn’t changed in five thousand years. My stats may look random. My inbox may look quiet. But the fact that readers still buy, still learn, still follow my work -  that’s surely the true heartbeat.

The web didn’t die. It's just scaled way beyond intimacy. And in doing so, obscured the humans behind the numbers.

The Dead Internet Theory feels plausible because the surface feels automated. But beneath that surface, the people are still there. They’re just harder to see. And perhaps that’s the real challenge of this era.

Not proving the internet is alive. But finding the humans within it.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell