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Developers used to have a home on the internet. Stack Overflow was our oracle. Twitter was our town square. Open source repos were our collective workshop. But something has gone wrong. Stack Overflow sits abandoned. Twitter lost its name and its soul. Open source repos are filled with AI-generated code that feels hollow. New "developer platforms" promise community but nobody shows up. The internet isn't just dying for everyone. It's dying for the people who built it. So we've gone underground into DMs, Discord servers, private Slacks. We're hiding at the edges of a web that doesn't feel like ours anymore. Two theories explain what happened to us. The "dark forest theory" suggests the public internet became hostile: bad actors, bots, trolls, and scrapers turned every public space into a minefield. So we learned to stay quiet, share less, and keep our real conversations private. The "dead internet theory" goes further: most of the content we see online is now generated by bots, for bots. We're not just hiding from threats anymore. We're performing for an audience that might not even be human, contributing to repositories that AI will scrape, answering questions that ChatGPT will repackage. This talk explores how these forces changed the developer internet, what it means to build and learn when the web feels broken, and whether we can still find each other.

• People
• AI/ML

Speaker

Sergès Goma

Software Developer

Sergès Goma is a Paris-based software developer specialized in Java and JavaScript. When she's not fixing codebases, she gives motivational speeches mostly aimed at junior and would-be developers as well as participating in the tech women's empowerment association Motiv'Her.