The Dead Internet Theory
In: Technology
The theory is that most of the content on the internet is fake. You go to the home page of /r/explainlikeimfive. You see questions like “ELI5: Why doesn’t the brain always release dopamine?” and “ELI5 – Why is taking logarithm to the base e called taking the natural logarithm”. How do you know that **people** posted those? You click on one. The top answer says something about base e being the limit of continuous compounding growth. How do you know that **a person** posted that?
You may think it’s obvious. You think: of course a person posted that, how else would it be here? But secret spam bots have been extremely popular on Reddit for years, that will re-post popular posts from the past, and popular comments from the past, to collect upvotes, so the system won’t punish them for spamming later. Now, of course, they use AI instead of just copying.
Spamming makes money, so there are a lot of these bots. Answering questions doesn’t, so there aren’t so many real answerers.
The dead internet theory says these bots are *most of everything on the internet*, outcompeting real people because spammers are pushing as many as possible to make money, political groups are pushing as many as possible to get your votes, enemy political groups are pushing as many as possible to destabilise your country and so on. While the real people are busy working jobs and only post a few times a day.
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