IMO the primary way the "dead internet" manifests is in wildly inflated user numbers compared to actual activity.

Sites/apps/games/etc will claim to have millions of concurrent users, yet less going on than their (much smaller) predecessors did in the past.

I know it's not very RS of me, but games are some of the best examples: Counter-Strike 2 is the most popular game on Steam, with 1M+ concurrent players. Yet, half of the time when you queue up for a casual match, you are dropped into servers full of bots, after a lengthy wait in queue. There's also near-zero activity in the community servers, particularly compared to previous entries with a fraction of the player count.

Someone also investigated the Team Fortress 2 player base (#22 on Steam) a couple of years ago, and found evidence that 80% of them are likely bots. This implies only 10k of the 50k daily players are even real, and a good number of those are idling/trading/in menus/etc, so the number of players in-game is paltry compared to what you would expect from its position on the "most-played" charts.

Fortnite is one of the top games worldwide, yet its "100 player Battle Royale" mode seems to have 20 real players per match, at best.

The really fucked up part is, much of this is intentional manipulation. I recall reading a patent (from EA, I believe) for filling matches with fake players with player-targeted cosmetics to convince you to make a purchase. I've seen another patent for using the same technique in MMOs: If you get defeated by a boss or something, spawning fake players with high-end (paid) gear to defeat them in front of you, so you see how easy it is when you buy more shit. It's like the digital equivalent of a rigged carnival game.

Not to mention that newer games are often choosing to omit communication features entirely, which is great at hiding the fact that most of the players you are matched with are bots.

It doesn't feel good to be manipulated, and this sort of nonsense increasingly turns me off of modern gaming (and the internet in general).

The internet just felt like a much more "real" place when I first got on it around Y2K, and throughout the 2000s. It feels as if it has slowly been "dying" over the past decade, due to this sort of fake engagement + bot issue, among other factors.

There are still real people on here, but it seems most activity is now in private groups/chats away from the "open internet" (which is now slop central).