Is anything on the internet real? Some days I have a look around online, and really start to wonder. It was back in October 1997 that I got my first computer with a modem, so next month will be my 27th anniversary of using the internet.
I took to the internet like a duck to water, and have used the internet nearly every day ever since. It almost seems essential, like eating or sleeping. I know it isn't, but I still feel like I really need everyday access to a computer with an internet connection.
Cell phones on the other hand, I've never felt that way about. After a PC, the next thing I got was a cell phone, in 1998, but I soon hated the damn thing, and thought it was a pain in the arse. For about five years I kept getting replacement Nokia 3110 phones when they had pre-pay special offers, but I always used them as little as possible.
After about five years of reluctantly owning cell phones I eventually said "sod this for a joke, cell phones suck" and just stopped having one altogether for about 15 years. These days I do have one, a 2018 Samsung Galaxy Note 9 pre-pay, that I top up once a year, but seldom carry and almost never use.
For a while, back around 2018, my blog www.frot.co.nz was quite popular, getting around 1500 hits a day, but during the covidhoax it got absolutely hammered (including being blacklisted by Google) and the hits dropped right back to about 100 a day, so I gradually gave up on it in 2023, and at the start of 2024 switched to only posting on my new www.sift.co.nz blog.
For the first year, my new blog also got very little traffic, only about 200 hits a day throughout 2024, but in 2025 the traffic started increasing, and the strange thing is that over the past few months it has started getting up to over 1500 views some days.
So my blog now seems to recovering back up to the previous levels of traffic that disappeared about five years ago. Why would that be? And is this traffic actual real people, or just AI traffic? I quite like the idea that more people are reading things I post online, but my impression is that the entire internet is being increasingly controlled.
I may be deluding myself here, but I like to believe that the deep state wants to bury my content and try to hide it from as many people as possible. So this recent increase in traffic has me quite perplexed.
At this stage I don't have a solid hypothesis, and my best guess is that they (Google/deep state) are using AI to give the impression of increasing traffic, when in reality I'm still only getting about 100 views a day. But why would they give a toss if some noddy nobody like me thinks I'm popular?
.jpg)