IMO, it’s because the internet today is driven by profit, which makes clicks, engagement, bots, ads, and bait the primary driver of how most things on the internet are created for. 15-20 years ago, blogs and websites were just there for people to share their interests and not to bombard you with ads. Social media platforms were there just to connect with your friends and share photos, and not an algorithm-driven engagement machine.

I think it will boil down to people leaving the internet, caused primarily by platform decay. The regular person realizes they are wasting their time looking at ragebait, ads and propaganda. The algorithm will no longer be able stimulate the user in a way that keeps them hooked and genuinely engaged. The influencers will be the last ones to quit, as they will be getting "engagement" by bots while regular users - mostly viewers who don't post or comment much - keep steadily leaving, also taking their friends and family with them.

Edit: I will add a bit of hopefulness:

I do think social media advertising has a bit of a bubbly vibe to it, I think the effectiveness of social media advertising is highly exaggerated. I can see internet advertisements get scaled down in the future, thus keeping the mainstream internet going for a few more years longer than if they keep up the current levels.

I am also feeling hopeful that the internet has helped people find offline hobbies easier, so leaving the internet will be easier and less socially devastating. People are getting ready to go outside.

Final edit:

I don't think internet will ever fully, permanently end. It has connected so many people from across the world based on so many different interests. For example, internet based gaming (selling, sharing, developing and playing together) is such a big and popular hobby, that there is no way in hell it will go away ever. The mainstream internet (meta-platforms, reddit, youtube, etc) will probably loose majority of their human users in the future, but as a whole I don't think internet will ever loose 100% of its users.

I couldn't disagree with this sentiment more vehemently

So that in turn, makes it so the only kind of discussions and talk you see is just softball kinds. You know, like discussing sports teams, the weather and vice versa.

Dead internet theory is when everyone is a bot run by a political actor who is yelling about politics, or a bot run by a corporation to deliver ads. Real human beings talk about the weather and sports and their garden and their pets and what they're making for dinner. I feel the most that I'm on the dead internet when everyone is talking about Big Ideas and Current Events and no-one is saying Go Reign or Look At This Cool Leaf I Found.

I think it's just sameness fatigue.

You have to observe the process for a while to understand the dynamic and when you do, it can appear that everything is just cyclic and boring. So an unbelievable number of people are now "aging out" of the 10-15 year period of exposure you need to understand what's worth engaging with and what isn't.

It's a certain realization that the original utopia of an interconnected places where everyone can share and everyone is interested in a broad number of topics and everyone can be nice for the purpose of discussion, is ending. Maybe I don't care for the big platform that has everything and everyone, because most of everything and most of everyone is not actually interesting to me. Regardless of whether they're bots or not.

If it's entertaining, it being fake isn't a problem. But if it's fake AND boring... why stick around.

tldr: the internet hasn't changed, we have. Or it did, but that's not the point.

Dead internet theory is an outcome.

IMO the core issue is the concept of “Necroalgorithmization” where the algorithm “a bias model by nature” decide who should we listen to and what should we talk about, this creates a slow exclusion process of any thing that does not fit its narrative, which is a forced narratives that can never be organic, hmm you can call it a manufactured reality.

What you said in your post is exactly describing this concept and of slow exclusion of diverse opinions, i think social media is an aggregator of Necroalgorithmization.

Not only that but also gets deeper with algorithms, it enforces classism and marginalization of humans.

Slowly this will kill any attempt of real human interactions and in 50 years you have gork bots or whatever the fuck its name replying to gemini bots about what is the benefits of Epstein class eating children’s or bombing schools.

FML

I think it's money. Got to have content to get views, only care it's good enough to turn a profit. Every thing else is secondary. If advertisers only want certain language, that's the language you will see. AI slop is easier to produce than manual slop, but either way we've been making slop a long time just to farm the clicks.

Yeah. It's the toxics. Algorithms rewarded them for being themselves and now it's everyone's problem. If you ever interview one about it and get them to be candid they usually believe they're performing a public service and not seeking attention that was distributed to them by a math equation.

Then there's how normal people do eventually log off, go to their jobs, sometimes don't come back. What you're left with is a bunch of guys who are all standing in a circle trying to tell the best joke.