The Dead Internet Theory
In: Technology
I once saw a spam ad here on reddit for t-shirts or something. I clicked on the username and saw months earlier they had one totally generics post in r/movies about lotr. The account sat idle for a few months, then started spewing spam. Reddit won’t just let a brand new account do a bunch of posts across subreddits, so if you want to spam, you need to have the account mimic real human behavior with some legitimate looking posts, then once the account seems legit to reddit it can get a lot more spam out before getting shut down. Now who was commenting on that lotr post? Very possibly other bot accounts working in tandem with the one that posted the thread to build up legitimacy. If you had clicked on that thread and commented, would you have been the only human present, interacting with bots who are just there to karma farm? ChatGPT things have made this even worse, you can even be having a 1-1 conversation with a bot, scammers do it all the time.
Dead Internet Theory is the extreme version about it where such a high percentage of internet content is bots trying to game some system or other, that you’re almost always just interacting with them. I don’t know how many people think this is literally true, but there’s definitely a trend in that direction.
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