But is the Internet dying? The thing it doesn’t say is if the human participation is dwindling.
To keep it simple, I’ll work with small numbers. Imagine there are 10 humans online. Now imagine 1 bot on online. Bots are 9% (1 in 11) of this imaginary online community. A year later, those same 10 humans are still online, but there are now 10 bots online; the bots are 50% of the community. This statistic can lead you to think there is less human participation when nothing happened to the humans. The difference is the raw number of bots. This is what I believe is happening, about the same number of humans, just an increasing number of bots, scraping, posting, etc.