r/rs_x • u/chesapeake_ripperz • Nov 25 '24
Schizo Posting 100% believe in dead internet theory now
been seeing way, way too many accounts with usernames that go something like "random noun_other random noun_4 numbers" that appear to be trained across three to five subreddits to either
a) say random shit that sounds mildly on-topic, or
b) post generic contributions to medium sized subs, like stolen images of baked goods to the smaller baking subreddits
i think what really bugs me is it just feels so purposeless and creepy. when bots used to spam links to buy crap online, it made sense. now they just pretend to be human for seemingly no end. some of them try to sway human opinion, but like 75% of them comment innocuous shit. i hate it :(
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u/Iakeman Nov 25 '24
Whenever I go to other subs now for info about a hobby or something I see all these clearly GPT-made comments that are highly upvoted and all the replies are like ‘this is such great info thank you!’ It might be one of the most depressing things I’ve ever seen. The fact that the average person is not only incapable of identifying these comments as AI generated but also thinks that they’re a substantive contribution to the discussion. I think I might become a Moldbug style monarchist
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u/discountprophet Nov 25 '24
You think the "this is great info!" comments aren't also bots?
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u/studiousmaximus Nov 25 '24
lol i love how their kneejerk understanding is that those completely substanceless replies are from humans
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u/Pale_Veterinarian626 Nov 25 '24
So too are the “my uncle died of mushroom poisoning advice from ai.”
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Nov 25 '24
It comes from people who lack reading comprehension. If you've already spent years reading books, whether they be literature, action serials for men, or smut, you gain some understanding of what words written by a human being look like. A lot of people don't read, and so most people will be fooled by AI.
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u/AltruisticStreet7470 Nov 25 '24
its the default name that reddit gives you
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u/BertAndErnieThrouple le epic quirk chungus XD Nov 25 '24
Kinda lame that people can't be bothered to make a personal username anymore. It takes like 5 seconds. Zoomers continue to find new and more niche ways to disappoint me.
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u/pha-raoh Nov 25 '24
Sometimes you don't want your username to be memorable
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u/BertAndErnieThrouple le epic quirk chungus XD Nov 25 '24
Sounds nefarious
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u/West_Introduction_95 Nov 25 '24
I felt called out by this post, but some people just prefer to be as anonymous as possible. Goes along with zoomers being extremely disillusioned with online culture while simultaneously understanding it more.
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u/BertAndErnieThrouple le epic quirk chungus XD Nov 25 '24 edited Nov 25 '24
You can be completely anonymous with a unique username. Just don't overshare and post pictures of yourself like a dummy. I mean, doing that on reddit to begin with is a complete misuse of the platform (which is uniquely anonymous amongst social media giants). I don't think zoomers really understand anonymity tbh. It's primarily a mental filter, not a digital one. No offense btw.
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u/West_Introduction_95 Nov 25 '24
My point is that people really don't care about their internet presence anymore. Spending more than a minute over a "cool and unique" username is a level of earnestness regarding internet presence that zoomers just don't care for. It was understandable for millenials and people older when the internet was new and no one really understood how it would develop, but zoomers now grew up with it as the norm and understand just how disposable it is. I mean it isn't even anything new to mock try hard usernames.
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u/studiousmaximus Nov 25 '24
speaking of memorable usernames, yours is pretty brilliant
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u/pha-raoh Nov 25 '24
Not really I just like pharoah sanders and pha-roah was taken
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u/studiousmaximus Nov 25 '24
interesting it reads completely as a “spell pharaoh” reference, unless it is and you were just wanting to mix it up with the pharoah sanders reference
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u/AltruisticStreet7470 Nov 25 '24
I'd probably just go from boring username > boring and painfully unfunny username
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u/Emergency_Outcome516 Nov 25 '24
It just gets tiresome after you’ve made your 5th account
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u/hoseja Nov 25 '24
But why do that
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u/Scratch_Careful Nov 25 '24 edited Nov 25 '24
If you've managed to hold a reddit account for 15 years you must be a boring sod who doesnt say anything even mildly controversial.
Also, internet is full of weirdos starting a new account every so often is just good practice.
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u/hoseja Nov 25 '24
I'm banned from like 75% of reddit lmao. If they don't want my contributions I'm not gonna help keep their fiefdoms alive.
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Nov 25 '24
sometimes you make a new account, get the default username, and get the prompt to change it later but click past it without noticing
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u/harkton Nov 25 '24
and then continue to use it without noticing or caring that you have a shitty name
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u/WingbingMcTingtong Nov 25 '24
Zoomers don't even know how to use Google. Do you really think they know how to go into reddit's account settings to change their name?
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u/chesapeake_ripperz Nov 25 '24
well shoot, i didn't know that. there's still too many bots, and those bots do use those generic names.
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Nov 25 '24
I’m someone who has long made friends via the internet - it has actually usually gone well for me, and some of my truly best friends have come from the internet.
Dead internet makes me sad for sentimental reasons. Now it’s like walking into a shitty dive bar you used to frequent but it’s well lit and there’s word art on the walls and all the drinks cost 28 dollars.
The friendship lives on but the place it started was turned into something unspeakable. It’s unholy. It feels like a desecration of something that already sucked, but sucked in a way I liked and understood.
I hated the internet and I hate it now. But somehow they made it worse and more inauthentic.
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u/BootleBadBoy1 Nov 25 '24
I look back with envy at people old enough to have been active participants in Web 1.0.
Used to be the case that you’d chat to people on a forum about fly-fishing or snowboarding or whatever with the potential to actually meet that person in real life and engage with your shared interest.
Now it’s just about trying to be the funniest/most controversial person on the forum.
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Nov 25 '24
[deleted]
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u/iMongoLloyd Nov 25 '24 edited Nov 25 '24
youtube comment bots are probably great practice for any entry level programmer.
(Any music released before 2024) "who else is listening to x in 2024?"
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u/NYCneolib Nov 25 '24
The issue with YouTube comments is that the AI deletion of them is so random. I don’t trust them. Clearly there are not that have been trained on how not to trigger it.
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u/bitchpigeonsuperfan Nov 25 '24
People pay for old accounts that have 'organically' generated post history; reposting generic images gets them nice and ripe for harvest.
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u/MoltenBronze Nov 25 '24
Something I've noticed in the last couple of months is a sharp uptick in the amount of posts missing a word in the middle of a sentence. It seems so specific and weird to suddenly have that go from an occasional mistake to seeing it all the time, and it gives me an uncanny feeling.
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u/Sophistical_Sage Nov 25 '24 edited Nov 25 '24
An error like that is pretty unlikely to be from an LLM. LLM's often produce writing that is boring and or factually Incorrect, they do not typically produce grammatical errors. Not anymore (altho they used to).
The average American has a 6th grade reading level and types on a phone, not to mention all the ESL ppl (also on their phone) on the internet now. Ironically its actually comments that have no grammatical or spelling errors and good formatting that you should be looking out for if you want to identify bot comments. Good formating, grammar and spelling is actually harder for the average human than for the LLMs now
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u/narrowassbldg Nov 25 '24
I do that too often lol... easier mistake to make on a phone than on the computer
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u/thousandislandstare Nov 25 '24
The thing I've really noticed is people (or bots) saying "consider as" instead of just "consider." Went from something I'd only occasionally see to something I see multiple times every single day now.
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u/kiristokanban Nov 25 '24
I thought dead internet theory was kind of an accepted thing until I casually brought it up in a conversation with some colleagues and they were like oh, that conspiracy theory? So I went to the Wikipedia page and sure enough it paints it as some kind of kooky internet conspiracy theory for weirdos. I had always been under the impression that it was a generally accepted thing that the internet was mostly rubbish being generated by bots at this point but I guess it's not as commonly held a belief as I thought. It's true though, every online service is shit now.
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u/fatwiggywiggles Nov 25 '24
Wikipedia is kinda cooked when you venture into anything that could be considered remotely political. Dead internet theory is only a conspiracy if you think it's being intentionally done by state actors to manipulate the public. Simply thinking there are a lot of bots on the web isn't kooky
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u/flamingknifepenis Custom Flair Nov 25 '24
It’s kind of both, in the same way that the moral panic around the “Dark Web” was taking something surprising but pretty banal and spinning it into a weird narrative about how it’s a harbinger of social decay.
The part that’s generally accepted is that an extremely large chunk of all internet traffic is bots “talking to each other.” This isn’t really all that nefarious when you think about search engines, archiving services, etc., which perform a lot of automated tasks on their own often involving large amounts of data transfer.
But some people take that to mean that the AI uprising is here and half the accounts commenting on various social media platforms are actually bots working as coordinated teams to manufacture consent.
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u/Teleket Nov 25 '24
I logged into my twitter account for the first time in like 3 years yesterday, I mustn't of had more than 10 followers, now I have 300, all of them pornbots.
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u/Mammon_Worshiper r******* f***** Nov 25 '24
every post on twitter now has 4-5 bots with check marks in the replies pretending to be indian now. bleak!
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u/Edwardwinehands Nov 25 '24
Very frightened I asked chatgpt as a joke to respond to you and it started just sending me blank messages after 3 tries - it was meant to be a joke but now I'm worried
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u/gmoddsafraegs Nov 25 '24
I get what you’re saying, and it’s definitely unsettling to notice these types of accounts cropping up everywhere. The feeling of something “off” when you see random usernames and generic comments can make it feel like there’s less genuine human interaction online. A lot of these bots seem designed to blend in as much as possible, which is what makes them creepy—there’s no obvious purpose like promoting a product or spamming links. But the fact that they still engage in seemingly random or innocuous conversations only adds to that sense of a hollow, manipulated space.
It’s kind of like a weird reflection of how automated systems have evolved—now they’re just mimicking the mundane behavior of real people, but without any real personal intent behind it. The “dead internet theory” touches on that idea—if the internet is mostly populated by bots or non-human entities, does it lose its authenticity? It’s a frustrating feeling, especially when it feels like these artificial accounts are eroding the value of genuine interaction. I think it’s a reminder that digital spaces can be easily manipulated, and it’s up to us to stay aware of it and protect the real human connections we want to keep intact.
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u/Edwardwinehands Nov 25 '24
Hahah! Only an AI would call real people mundane - I think you're all interesting
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Nov 25 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/gmoddsafraegs Nov 25 '24
Mi a gwaan put di Jamaican man weh live inside mi phone to good use. Big up fi di idea!
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u/sn0wflaker Nov 25 '24
For point a. It disturbs me especially because it makes people interact with those comments and I think of the implications that can have for manufacturing what public opinion is understood to be.
For example I saw some tweet about bike lanes in my city and there were clearly Indian bot accounts saying things like “biking is a necessary means of travel in my city” and randoms are having full conversations with them.
We hear a lot about bot farms and manufactured outrage, but imagine if those bots were created to have the opinions of your enemies and fight you-it would make you think your community is hostile. I’m sure it’s happening now but I’m concerned with the future. Perhaps it will make people stop using the internet entirely.
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u/thousandislandstare Nov 25 '24
The weirdest example of this is in a fairly niche car enthusiast subreddit that I follow. Less than 30k readers and bots will still inexplicably repost images and posts from the same sub from like 4 or 5 years ago. In the summer there were like three different posts of like "Just took my baby for a spin today :)" with a picture of a car in the snow.
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u/FriendlyPanache Nov 25 '24
always find it funny these extremely weird inefficiency patterns that crop with the information age... like how the infrastructure supporting (most) cryptocurrencies somehow intrinsically requires the existence of massive computation farms literally dedicated to fucking around and wasting energy. don't personally think we're all the way there with dead internet theory but easily in 5-10 years huge swathes of the internet will be solely populated by bots pretending to talk to each other
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u/BirdoTheMan Nov 25 '24
I'm in favor of a mark-of-the-beast style bio verification that guarantees anyone posting anywhere on the internet is a human or has to identify as a robot.
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u/Don_Geilo Nov 25 '24
I agree with your point and thank you for this post. Let's make other posts about normal human experiences and gripes. I love feeling emotions.
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u/MinimumFinancial6785 Nov 25 '24 edited Nov 25 '24
Thinking that everything is bots has helped me to do a lot less posting and replying in places where i know this might more or less be the case. I couldn't help myself with the Cormac McCarthy VF article though. Im pretty sure i got screamed at by bots for daring to say that I enjoyed reading it and thought it was beautiful.
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u/smooth__liminal Custom Flair Nov 25 '24
I am writing to clarify that I am not a bot. All of my interactions on [platform] are genuine and made by me personally. If my activity appears automated, it’s simply because I engage consistently and promptly, which might have led to a misunderstanding.
I take pride in being an active and authentic member of this community and assure you that I do not use any automated tools. Please feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.
Thank you for your understanding.
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Nov 25 '24
The most egregious form of this is trying to find people recommending products and shit.. everything has been astroturfed to shit by bots. Almost zero genuine comments to be found. Just bots shilling whatever name brand.
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u/feelingthesametoday Nov 25 '24
The auto username feature does that so either just people too lazy to make a username or yeah bots
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Nov 25 '24
Reddit is a bad example bc Reddit is one of the most heavily astroturfed public sites around. why do you think Zionism and love of the Imperialist Western hegemon is so rampant
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u/thomastypewriter Nov 25 '24
I’ve def noticed the “noun noun four numbers names.” They’re on every sub devoted to any kind of specific interest, and sometimes they make a show of trying to prove they’re not bots by attempt to start a debate with one of their posts, but it’s always an extremely old, tired conversation that a bot could easily scratch together no problem.
I can’t wait for the internet to become uncool and for it to become a major class signifier to own physical media again. It’s already kind of getting there.
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Nov 25 '24
Like mine? You know it is randomly assigned by reddit I don't really know how this sub came on my radar but I find the topics raised interesting. Like someone searching for direction... but when I read the comments I feel like I stepped into a place I don't belong because they are so poorly informed. I don't troll I just browse out of boredom looking for things that catch my eye Sorry for that if needed. Carry on but jut know many folks just stick with the rando name reddit generates. Cheers. .
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u/Huge-Web-2117 Nov 25 '24 edited Nov 25 '24
it's extremely easy and inexpensive to manipulate a sub. the "main sub" is probably 15% bots, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but through vote manipulation, most people end up upvoting or downvoting what’s already popular or unpopular. herd behavior is VERY powerful— even a genius can't go against it.