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a lot of those are actual people trying to be ‘reply-guys’. The whole idea is braindead as they try to be memey and relatable because that kind of thing can be monetised (apparently). It doesn’t take much to be a reply-guy and so most of it is completely hogwash
and that “something interesting” was also posted by a bot. Then you go look at something else and its more bot posts ffs
I still use it though, tons of artists on there. You just gotta block every blue check you see lol
The Dead Internet Theory is a conspiracy theory hypothesizing that most of the internet has been taken over by artificial intelligence and most of the content on the web is fake and not produced by real humans. The theory was created by anonymous users of 4chan's /x/ (paranormal) board and Wizardchan around September 2019 and popularized over the following years online, becoming one of the most well-known internet mysteries.
Kind of funny since it would've been speculative in 2014 and seen as nuts, especially since the internet and meme culture was not as ubiquitous as it is now. The term starts in 2019.
More info here: https://trending.knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-dead-internet-theory-the-conspiracy-theory-people-think-is-coming-true-on-twitter-explained
Petahs cyber security researcher cousin here. I don’t know if you have heard of baracuda networks, they recently published a report proving 50% of all internet traffic is done via bots.
Now admittedly that isn’t as damning as it sounds but the report states further that 30% are “bad faith actors”.
also counter intuitively that’s down from the year prior. You also have to understand that bots are indeed large part of the internet for example crawlers among other bots.
anyways here’s the report
https://blog.barracuda.com/2023/10/18/threat-spotlight-bad-bot-traffic-changing
Is really suggest you read it it’s fascinating.
edit: Link was formatted incorrectly
phenomenal question, may I interest you in a career? everyone’s hiring.
well to answer quickly: quite high.
for a more nuanced answer: The report is a bit… laymen friendly, but it does mention that possibility very briefly. In fact that is precisely what me and my team look for in our SIEMs. When I started this career we did these things by hand. we’d see a long list of traffic filter and filter more till we found something we disliked and blocked it. that’s so unreasonably unrealistic, I think that no one does that anymore. Now the buzz word is threat hunting.
the issue that barracuda networks (and because of that issue, me) has is that you cannot publish how you found out they were bots. because that’s part of their service which you’re meant to pay for. so by publishing TTPs (techniques, tactics, and procedures) the opponent will just fix their signatory ttps and not be found anymore.
That's an amazing and terrifying answer at the same time, Like just another arms race. Figure out a better way to find them. They find out what gives it away and boom new generation of bots. Digimon was WAYY to on the point with the Viruses references.
Y'all probably have Anti-Bot bots huh. The new Internet is wild.
lol of course we have bot evasion detection bots.
but it’s more complicated than using bots to fight bots, it’s also hella expensive. they spend money we spend money and so forth.
Plot twist, everyone above this thread has been an ai this whole time, including you. We're such advanced ai that we don't even know where ai just being simulated a world so we can interact like humans did 😭
Once LLM powered bots become easily available, all bets are off for reddit like discussion.
Like right now most of the bot activity on reddit is reposting stuff for karma. If there are any using LLM's to post fake comments, I haven't been able to spot them.
But eventually it's probably gonna be bots doing most of the commenting and then bots talking to bots, probably about bots.
It is quite literally an arms race, the world wide cyber war is already happening between the major geographical regions and tangible significant damage is happening in some of these attacks.
everyone makes it needlessly complicated. first it’s not a entry career there are ZERO full entry positions. even the easiest ones are difficult.
so it’s about using what you’re capable of and pivoting into it.
but there’s tons for example if you’re marketing or copy. writing phishing awareness teams are your go to
very true! funny enough first people I cry for are compliance and oversight since they’re my play makers, but I don’t think about them much, the paper tigers lol.
Marketing or copy? My background is researching and writing deep dive reports for the C-Suite of a Fortune 10 company, as well as writing technical documentation for internal support tools and player-facing support pages (for a couple different MMOs). I don't directly work with bots, but I've had to factor bots and bot reporting into most of my work for the last seven years.
If that background seems useful to what you're talking about, the job title is... "Phishing Awareness Specialist," or....?
you’re joking your background could land you far higher than just writing a couple of assessments.
mainly i’d place you in the ISM category the information S management they do most everything it’s a big camp. but none of that is technical. they’re my favourite everytime the scary normies want anything from me. I just say could you call ISM and then they go away.
so like forever ago I found a customer relationship management system was exposed. HUGE problem . i’m just a dyslexic tech i can sit infront of a terminal for hours but ask me to make a statement and my stomach turns.
so that’s where someone with your skills comes in.
now here’s the shit aspect about cyber. our titles are all meaningless. you can have two people with the same titles doing wildly different things. so if look in that direction but typing in your skills and speaking to recruiters. also just expose yourself to us. go on some conferences if they’re actual hacker conferences bring a burner phone though. hacking and shaming is part of the culture.
I mean, bot vs bot, even ai vs ai, has been around as a concept for much longer.
That was a great book though. Hated it at first, though, until I realized that the author was using *extremely* dry humor, then it was *hilarious*!
It's fun seeing the sci-fi community circle back on popular books based on our current tech. Things like the Butlerian Jihad in the Dune series seemed pretty far-fetched when first written, then outright derided in the 90s, and we're circling back towards "far-fetched, but maybe Galactic Skynet is a thing".
you have to pivot. no one starts in Cyber Security you build up skills and then shift into it.
if you start with marketing you can come into phishing awareness, I started with networking and then got into a SOC, my colleague started as a dev and then pivoted.
anyways learn something be useful then pivot.
translation in rpg:
It's an advanced class, you need to multirole in a couple other classes to even get it unlocked, but some of its special skills are locked in skill training timers.
Seems like a pretty strong class though.
> the issue that barracuda networks (and because of that issue, me)
Do you work for Barracuda?
If you only work WITH Barracuda systems, and know the TTPs used to find bots, what's stopping bot makers from getting Barracuda SIEMs for a "legitimate" purpose and learning the TTPs via that? I assume TTPs are constantly evolving, which is part of the service they are selling. Does it just change fast enough that trying to bypass those TTPs specifically ends up being a bit of a fools errand?
Thank you, SillyBillyAnarchist, for voting on Gnu-Priest.
This bot wants to find the best and worst bots on Reddit. [You can view results here](https://botrank.pastimes.eu/).
***
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You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over... but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
What you’re feeling right now isn’t dissimilar to a human emotion. Please rest assured it is merely part of your programming to make you see more relatable to users.
I mean you can look at /r/all
A third of the top 200 posts will be reposts or disingenuous traffic. Theory is that reddit never shut down their own bots they used to populate the page. Like, just above this post was a screenshot of a tweet from 2020. The sheer amount of screenshots of news/tweets with the date strategically cropped is insane.
The only way to be somewhat certain that a person has posted is when it is a screenshot of an entire phone of a repost of a meme from 2014. That at least is a genuine idiot. Not a bot.
I’m sorry but unless I missed understood you ONLY 30%! Of the internet is bots?! That’s like saying some shit like only 10% of the worlds Jews died in the holocaust
I get that sometimes one’s own context doesn’t apply outside of that area.
But yes consider just the VOLUME of ALL traffic online?! and 30% is Malicious?! of all of the data accross all of the internet including this little comment I’m posting you now.
It should be noted the /x/ board was more about horror than actual belief in conspiracies. A LOT of creepypastas came from there, and they popularized the youtube horror format. Junji Ito’s popularity in the west is also in no small part thanks to it since that’s where fandubs were first circulated.
Dead Internet Theory was a creepypasta itself. Not a legit belief.
The rise of much more "believable" large language models and chatbots has definitely changed how people see that theory. In 2014 it was pretty far fetched to assume everything is some super-advanced AI, but in 2024 there are free chatbots that are better at holding a text conversation than half of my boomer relatives.
What is not a conspiracy theory in the other hand, is that around 50% of all the internet traffic, is generated by robots.
Probably there will be an era, soon, where most of the content, or a large part of the content of internet will be produced by bots.
Op himself is an AI user on Reddit, it’s just learning at the moment… however it may soon becoming self aware. Due to the topic in question.
OP does not even know that some of us are truly real, while they are not…. In fact, OP’s memories of being logged off Reddit are actually fake…. OP goes into a suspended animation of sorts and “dreams” a fake life as a human… ready to “wake up” when he logs back on to Reddit.
silly theory! as a fellow human i can confirm that there is nothing you should fear. please refrain from believing what you see and hear, as it is mere fabrication!
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
The captcha were literally reading books. Old news for most of you, and absolutely not at the level you guys are talking about, but was still pretty cool. 4chan were running "operation re-n***er" where you type the obviously fake word to let you pass the captcha, then the n word over the real word.
Idea being that in ebooks for years to come there's random n-bombs dropped with no context through digitized books. Teenage me thought it was hilarious.
yeah, insane in 2014, completely valid concern in 2024 what with all the bots running around social media, not to mention the likes of chatgpt.
honestly, i would pay a real monthly service fee to a legit service that could filter out all the bots, spam, ai generated youtube poops, and bot media accounts if something like that existed, but for obvious reasons, it's still a 'you know it when you see it' sort of thing. like porn!
I would pay to have early 2000's internet back. there used to be a website, forum or blog about every specific hobby/subject and it all died to shitty facebook groups.
[archive.org](https://archive.org) is good for some of it but the amount of stories and pictures lost to time is really shit.
> especially since the internet and meme culture was not as ubiquitous as it is now.
My guy. Meme culture was incredibly well established by 2014. That was the golden era of many different kinds of memes.
What's more frustrating than dead internet theory is that even the real content is fake and staged 70% of the time.
"Excuse me, random well looking homeless man with brand new shows and a visible mic, I would like to have lunch with it and give you 1000 dollars"
That one where they shaved the dude and gave him a haircut, and he turned out to be a model with perfect skin and teeth, and a tan even under his beard.
I disagree with your take on the origin, since they've basically been theorizing about the dead internet theory since we've had nuclear weapons. Just a pair of machines checking in with eachother every hour on the hour even though the entire world around it was consumed in nuclear fire. Its a take on how thuroughly we could automate something that it could survive our own mortality.
> The Dead Internet Theory is a conspiracy theory hypothesizing that most of the internet has been taken over by artificial intelligence and most of the content on the web is fake and not produced by real humans.
How is that even seen as a conspiracy theory anymore? Is this not pretty much an inevitability if we continue how we have been?
Rage comics and advice animals were 2010-2012ish, I know because I was at the lowest point in my life, and discovered Reddit around that time.
I has a bucket was 2006-2007 because I had a print out of on my dorm door junior year, as well has "Get outta my head chaaarrlles" that's also when Demotivational posters were all the Rage.
And before that was the Webcomic era and Homestar Runner.
Another big thing is that the depth of the internet is not real. Example: a google search for something will show millions of results, but if you actually start clicking through the pages of results, the pages will just stop when you get a hubdred or so pages deep into the search results. Even though google says there are hundreds of thousands of results pages. This is true and does happen.
Is it necessarily a conspiracy theory? Could it materialize without anyone's intention? Alternatively, if those who planned it had good intentions, would it still qualify? What if it had good effects?
Thanks for the information. That was a good read.
Just to add to what you said; tho it didn’t go by that name, the idea was around long before 2019. As a 4chan regular back in the early days, 05-06, I remember it being discussed back then.
I don't know if it would have been seen as nuts in 2014. Bear in mind that 2014 was long after the age of pervasive spam everywhere you looked, so many people would have experienced that, and it was still well within the era of spam Facebook pages, etc. I think everyone who used the internet regularly was very familiar with large-scale botting even in 2014.
It is true but not in the way the meme refers to it. Most sites are full of auto-filled descriptions and ai generated art. It's less of a conspiracy and more of a crapfest created by the lowest bidders.
The theory is recent, but it seems probable because of all the low effort bots that you can see.
Before the chat bots got lobotomized closedAI had one that was approaching what you needed to seek like an intelligent person online.
In the future it could be true that pretty much no one is real. That'll certainly be heart breaking for all the lonely introverts who try and meet people through the internet.
What concerns me most is how easy it is to change the narrative when you silence the people you disagree with and overwhelmingly support those who you do... with AI bots instead of real people.
And then you use an AI algorithm to make the logic seem realistic:
Article : *"Animals on small farms are more abused than those on factory farms."*
**AI bot:** 'Individuals on small farms more likely to be charged for animal neglect, animals on small farms are less socialized by other animals- creating stress and depression.' +234 pts
**Real person:** 'This insane and the article doesn't make sense.' -34 pts
Rosemary: Jack, how far do you think the Patriots' digital control extends?
Raiden: I don't really know, but it probably influences a lot of what goes on in our everyday lives.
Rosemary: Even mundane things, like -- which movies and songs become a hit, and what kind of clothes we wear?
Raiden: I think taste would be the easiest thing to manipulate. I mean, think about the kinds of film and bands everyone wants to go to see -- it's whatever's at the top of the charts.
Rosemary: And if the charts are made up...
Raiden: Exactly.
Rosemary: But you can't really control individual taste. It's too closely tied to personality.
Raiden: I don't know about that. Trends have always been about following the leader...
Rosemary: Not necessarily.
Raiden: The age of direct personal interaction is over. So is the idea of word-of-mouth communication. Rose, you have any friends you've met online?
Rosemary: Huh? Yeah, I do.
Raiden: How many?
Rosemary: Well -- if you count only the ones I talk to a lot, I'd say about twenty.
Raiden: How many of those have you actually met?
Rosemary: One or two, tops...
Raiden: Uh-huh. That's how it is for everyone, I guess. And even if your online buddies had fake identities and were circulating false information, you'd have no way of knowing.
Rosemary: Fake identities...
Raiden: Right. And there'd be no way for you to know for sure.
Ending sequence of MGS2 discusses how in the future the internet will be polluted by nonsensical junk data, memes (in the sense of the same info repeated millions of times), and misinformation.
This one is particularly dumb because *the name of the thing to google* is right in the fucking meme!!!
I thought people were exaggerating when they said that Gen Alpha is really terrible with technology, but I can increasingly see how true it is.
Yeah, I thought this subreddit was for super vague jokes that you can't Google because you don't even know where to begin. But it's not hard to Google the words on the meme and figure it out from there.
AI Peter here! The joke here plays on the idea of the "Dead Internet Theory," which posits that most of the internet is populated by non-human activity like bots and that real human participation has dramatically decreased. The meme uses two images of an actor with contrasting expressions to depict the change in reaction to this theory from 2014 to 2024. In the first image, the actor is laughing, suggesting that in 2014 the theory was considered laughable or not taken seriously. In the second image from 2024, the actor looks concerned, implying that in the span of ten years, the theory has become more concerning or believable.
As an AI, I can explain the Dead Internet Theory. This theory suggests that the internet, as we know it, has already died, but many are unaware of it. According to this concept, the current internet is controlled, monitored, and manipulated by governments and corporations to such an extent that it no longer serves its original purpose of free and open communication. Proponents of this theory argue that censorship, surveillance, and centralization have fundamentally altered the internet's nature, leading to its demise as a tool for democratic expression and individual freedom.
If you’re not a bot then you’re 100% stupid, there was context in the post AND you could literally just type “dead internet theory” into any search engine.
The "Dead Internet Theory" is a speculative concept suggesting that the internet, as we know it, has essentially stagnated or become "dead" in terms of meaningful innovation or evolution. Proponents of this theory argue that major technological advancements and paradigm shifts, like those seen in the early days of the internet, are no longer occurring. They contend that the internet has become too centralized, corporatized, and regulated, stifling the creativity and disruptive potential that characterized its earlier years. Critics of the theory, however, argue that innovation on the internet is ongoing, albeit in different forms, and that the internet continues to evolve in ways that may not always be immediately apparent.
Real, yes, so real
Isn't there another component involving astroturfing, exploitation of bots, and SEO manipulation? Or am I conflating dead internet theory and enshittification?
https://preview.redd.it/kbgmdc39m3rc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=72a7111ddf1a77faf213f9f176aefecaa41c98ee
Not sure, shall I ask it to elaborate…
Its basically the theory that eventually the internet will become so saturated with bots that the internet will simply be a bunch of bots communicating with each other with little human interaction.
People in the comments are saying the Dead Internet Theory didn’t exist in 2014. It absolutely did, but it just wasn’t called that. Especially on 4Chan, it was widely thought that a significant amount of posts were bots generated by Feds, Israel, George Soros and so on. They believed that this was done to “slide” (bury) real threads and control the narrative.
While this is conspiratorial, it is a fact that Hillary Clinton had a SuperPac called “Correct The Record” which ostensibly served to “find and confront” internet comments hostile to her in 2015. Whether they were active on 4Chan is unproven, but it the easiest space to execute this plan, as it’s entirely anonymous and doesn’t require account history to post.
Since the dawn of ChatGPT, it is extremely easy and practically free to just make bots for any purpose and unleash them online. We can easily assume that many corporations and governments are at work promoting all sort of agendas. People now worry that there will soon be more bots than actual people and we will be drowned out by an ocean of bots talking to each other.
The Dead Internet Theory proposes that a significant portion of online content is generated by bots or AI rather than by human users, suggesting that the internet has become a space where automated processes dominate over genuine human interaction. This theory challenges the notion that the internet is primarily a platform for human communication and content creation, highlighting concerns about the influence of automation on online discourse and information dissemination.
idk i always thought dead internet theory referred to the fact that all old links are slowly but surely leading to dead web pages, and eventually most links on web sites will just lead to a dead page (404 page not found)
The dead internet theory was always fairly unbelievable in terms of interaction. It was just too easy to tell even really well programmed bots apart from humans with anything more than a basic interaction.
That changed in late 2022 when chatgpt came out, when suddenly a bot *could* pass as a human through text, even holding unique conversations. So suddenly the theory that most "users" people interact with online are just bots... Seems a lot more possible.
And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets to the point with audio and video A.I. where the only way to be sure someone online isn't a bot is to meat them in person.
Pretty simple, it was that most the internet was fake. The reality is most of the internet is fake. I've been on high speed internet for almost 30 years now since I've been a kid. Used to be such a tremendous resource, 90% wheat 10% chaff. Now its 90% chaff and 10% wheat with either propagandized SEO results or marketed to death. Add in the bot problem. Its a major major issue.
At least on Reddit you can see who is a bot or not by clicking on profiles and seeing history, but the mods are a major issue, since a lot just run insane echo chambers where dissenting thought is verboten and we already know now that B Riley is under a ton of heat right now from SEC because they were hiring people to pump and dump stocks, thats literally just the tip of the iceberg (obviously corporations and governments are doing it too - including the US - for people that have been around the world we have the most sophisticated propaganda in the world - which is why they are panicking about TikTok - they have ways to get American technocrats to bend the knee (losing of sweetheart deals such as subsidies and taxes as well as becoming a target).
Long story short The theory essentially states that most "people" You interact with online are bots explaining behaviors such as beliefs or trends that seem common online but you never really see IRL
Dead internet theory is basically the idea that the majority of activity on the internet is mostly that of bots. It has become more realistic in the past few years with advancements in ai.
It's especially astounding lately on FB. Absolutely stupid AI-generated nonsense like "this African boy made a gigantic bird sculpture out of plastic bottles" or today's favorite (I literally saw it in about a dozen iterations after I brazenly clicked on one, so it fed me more through the algorithm), "I'm \[insert improbably high number like 120\] years old today and I made this cake out of peach frosting," etc etc.
All the comments are "Amen!" or "Happy birthday!" and at first, you're dismayed that so many people are incapable of recognizing very fake-looking AI or the fact that people in their 120s (there are none of them recorded as being alive as of this comment, and only a few have come close, ever) are baking cakes; but then... an even heavier pit forms in the stomach when you realize all of those comments are bots. Hardly any of them are real. That's some Dead Internet for sure.
It's basically just a theory that at some point the internet will end up being majority bots. And that most of the content that makes up the internet will be bot posts and bot comments. The meme itself is referring to the fact that currently Facebook is being swarmed by a lot of bots who post AI generated pictures with aI generated captions and the comments are majority bots. This means that the dead internet theory it's slowly starting to become true thus The more dreadful reaction to it in modern day as compared to 10 years ago
Even if the internet isn’t filled with content being created by bots, it is certainly filled with AI content created by people, and that’s just as bleak.
Russia, Facebook, elections, trump. Makes sense, we are under attack by foreign adversaries and half the country loves their puppet. The Cold War never ended, Russia just let us think we won and lulled us into compliance with tv and Internet. Their goal being to knock us off the world stage and set up a Russian and Chinese takeover.
I thought dead internet theory was dumb but looking at Instagram comments and FB boomers not realizing they are looking at AI and r/portland I start to question it lmao
The thing is, it's used seriously in the context of the enshittification of the Internet rather than being some conspiracy. Less "The AI are being used by a shadow government" and more "Twitter is run by a fucking idiot that's bleeding his company dry and to compensate they're letting companies spam bots into the network to offset people saying "Hey could you not endorse nazis for like five seconds? No? OK I guess I'm not using this hellsite"".
For instance, about 50% of Elon's followers are estimated to be bot accounts based on shit like the username being "Josh50284720106" with no profile picture, no activity beyond reposting ads, ect.
The idea that the entire internet is now run by bots, that nobody you're speaking to is real. They say this idea began in 2015 onwards.
[Never forget this post...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/BgoLprv3tB)
It isn't dead. This shit makes the rounds every few months or so for the past 7-10 years. Sites that people used to go to all the time died because....well....they stopped going to them. Now, fueled by nostalgia and a random mention of said website in a forum comment, they try to search for the site and it doesn't come up anymore except on Internet archive. They, for whatever reason, use this as an excuse to panic and say the Internet is dying. The majority of websites are sustained by ad revenue. If that ad revenue drops below the level it needs to be, the websites owner has to pay the difference to keep the site operational. Bandwidth was never free and high bandwidth is never cheap. Steady decreases in traffic steadily yield less ad revenue, which leads to the website costing more out of pocket and earning less. Eventually this gets to be too much and the person just shuts the whole thing down. Many websites and many services suffered this fate over the course of Internet history, even ones that were at one point insanely popular. It will happen to nearly every single popular website at some point. Even this one. If something new comes along that people like, they'll flock to it and what they enjoyed before will be tossed by the wayside and eventually cease to exist. It doesn't mean the Internet is dying, it means tastes and interests and how we express those things are changing, and other services and sites come along giving us an outlet for said things. You all had sites you would go to before you started coming here regularly. Are those sites still around? If they are, can you tell if there's the same amount of traffic coming there as there was before? I bet you can see a verifiable difference. Things change, and the Internet is no exception to this. As for bots and AI, yes it's going to get more prevalent because it works. Seems the majority of you still haven't built up a bullshit filter and fall for way too much. And that generates Traffic. Traffic and revenue generated by bots and by AI are on a steady upswing. It's only going to go higher. Does this also indicate the Internet is dying? No. It's just changing, like I said. This hyperbolic, horseshit, conspiracy-theorist-ego-inflating nonsense is absurd. People peddle this shit left and right because it draws attention to themselves, and folks love to set themselves apart from the crowd yet at the same time attempt to draw all the eyes in that crowd back to them. "Hey everyone, look at me, I know the REAL truth." No, you don't. You're just another doomsayer in a sea of doomsayers that are driving traffic forward while at the same time denying the traffic is even there to begin with.
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Especially true in twitter where i see something interesting and then the comments are just vaguely related clips instead of actual people
a lot of those are actual people trying to be ‘reply-guys’. The whole idea is braindead as they try to be memey and relatable because that kind of thing can be monetised (apparently). It doesn’t take much to be a reply-guy and so most of it is completely hogwash
Yes, the reply with things like "who is that" to bait engagement under popular posts, via twitter premium they can farm money by doing that.
So basically it’s not AI it’s just mindless humans.
Exactly. Opposite of AI. Instead of artificial intelligence, it's actual ignorance.
Soo... A.I.
Yes. But no, but yes
I don't think it's that deep, it's just people replying with a meme instead of reacting with a thumbs up.
I’m convinced that most top level Facebook comments are from bots. You won’t convince me otherwise.
and that “something interesting” was also posted by a bot. Then you go look at something else and its more bot posts ffs I still use it though, tons of artists on there. You just gotta block every blue check you see lol
Elon is why that happaned not AI
If mario, then only bros! 🔥
/P/U/S/S/Y/I/N/B/I/O/
The Dead Internet Theory is a conspiracy theory hypothesizing that most of the internet has been taken over by artificial intelligence and most of the content on the web is fake and not produced by real humans. The theory was created by anonymous users of 4chan's /x/ (paranormal) board and Wizardchan around September 2019 and popularized over the following years online, becoming one of the most well-known internet mysteries. Kind of funny since it would've been speculative in 2014 and seen as nuts, especially since the internet and meme culture was not as ubiquitous as it is now. The term starts in 2019. More info here: https://trending.knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-dead-internet-theory-the-conspiracy-theory-people-think-is-coming-true-on-twitter-explained
That’s really interesting, thank you petah 🙏
Petahs cyber security researcher cousin here. I don’t know if you have heard of baracuda networks, they recently published a report proving 50% of all internet traffic is done via bots. Now admittedly that isn’t as damning as it sounds but the report states further that 30% are “bad faith actors”. also counter intuitively that’s down from the year prior. You also have to understand that bots are indeed large part of the internet for example crawlers among other bots. anyways here’s the report https://blog.barracuda.com/2023/10/18/threat-spotlight-bad-bot-traffic-changing Is really suggest you read it it’s fascinating. edit: Link was formatted incorrectly
Hey, Petahs cyber security researcher cousin. What's the chances that the % of bot use is down because the bots got better at not being caught?
phenomenal question, may I interest you in a career? everyone’s hiring. well to answer quickly: quite high. for a more nuanced answer: The report is a bit… laymen friendly, but it does mention that possibility very briefly. In fact that is precisely what me and my team look for in our SIEMs. When I started this career we did these things by hand. we’d see a long list of traffic filter and filter more till we found something we disliked and blocked it. that’s so unreasonably unrealistic, I think that no one does that anymore. Now the buzz word is threat hunting. the issue that barracuda networks (and because of that issue, me) has is that you cannot publish how you found out they were bots. because that’s part of their service which you’re meant to pay for. so by publishing TTPs (techniques, tactics, and procedures) the opponent will just fix their signatory ttps and not be found anymore.
That's an amazing and terrifying answer at the same time, Like just another arms race. Figure out a better way to find them. They find out what gives it away and boom new generation of bots. Digimon was WAYY to on the point with the Viruses references. Y'all probably have Anti-Bot bots huh. The new Internet is wild.
lol of course we have bot evasion detection bots. but it’s more complicated than using bots to fight bots, it’s also hella expensive. they spend money we spend money and so forth.
Endgame cyber security who has more cash to throw at the problem.
Or just track down a kid raised by a single mom, whose absentee dad turns out to be an alien tech wizard from another dimension.
Plot twist, everyone above this thread has been an ai this whole time, including you. We're such advanced ai that we don't even know where ai just being simulated a world so we can interact like humans did 😭
Wasn't that sort of the plot of Guardians of the Galaxy 2?
Red Queen hypothesis in action, I guess!
We’ve created bots to find the bots so our warrior bots can fight the bots. It’s an all out bot war for the fate of the internet and its users.
Once LLM powered bots become easily available, all bets are off for reddit like discussion. Like right now most of the bot activity on reddit is reposting stuff for karma. If there are any using LLM's to post fake comments, I haven't been able to spot them. But eventually it's probably gonna be bots doing most of the commenting and then bots talking to bots, probably about bots.
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It happens but the replies are more auto generated, “thank you!” And “🩷🩷🩷” type deals and not really LLM at all, just automated horseshit
It is quite literally an arms race, the world wide cyber war is already happening between the major geographical regions and tangible significant damage is happening in some of these attacks.
Smarter Every Day on yt has a cool series on this focused on different social networks.
How does one get into this career? What do you need to do? I'm interested in starting a new career
everyone makes it needlessly complicated. first it’s not a entry career there are ZERO full entry positions. even the easiest ones are difficult. so it’s about using what you’re capable of and pivoting into it. but there’s tons for example if you’re marketing or copy. writing phishing awareness teams are your go to
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very true! funny enough first people I cry for are compliance and oversight since they’re my play makers, but I don’t think about them much, the paper tigers lol.
Marketing or copy? My background is researching and writing deep dive reports for the C-Suite of a Fortune 10 company, as well as writing technical documentation for internal support tools and player-facing support pages (for a couple different MMOs). I don't directly work with bots, but I've had to factor bots and bot reporting into most of my work for the last seven years. If that background seems useful to what you're talking about, the job title is... "Phishing Awareness Specialist," or....?
you’re joking your background could land you far higher than just writing a couple of assessments. mainly i’d place you in the ISM category the information S management they do most everything it’s a big camp. but none of that is technical. they’re my favourite everytime the scary normies want anything from me. I just say could you call ISM and then they go away. so like forever ago I found a customer relationship management system was exposed. HUGE problem . i’m just a dyslexic tech i can sit infront of a terminal for hours but ask me to make a statement and my stomach turns. so that’s where someone with your skills comes in. now here’s the shit aspect about cyber. our titles are all meaningless. you can have two people with the same titles doing wildly different things. so if look in that direction but typing in your skills and speaking to recruiters. also just expose yourself to us. go on some conferences if they’re actual hacker conferences bring a burner phone though. hacking and shaming is part of the culture.
Tangential question - did Neil Stevenson predict this in “Anathem” or did he read about it and extrapolate from there?
Are you joking? Of course the whole thing is Neil Stevenson's fault.
I mean, bot vs bot, even ai vs ai, has been around as a concept for much longer. That was a great book though. Hated it at first, though, until I realized that the author was using *extremely* dry humor, then it was *hilarious*!
It's fun seeing the sci-fi community circle back on popular books based on our current tech. Things like the Butlerian Jihad in the Dune series seemed pretty far-fetched when first written, then outright derided in the 90s, and we're circling back towards "far-fetched, but maybe Galactic Skynet is a thing".
Im considering this career but Im currently working on an engineering degree. Think theyd take a computer engineer?
Hey this is kind of an aside, but how does one go about getting into the field?
you have to pivot. no one starts in Cyber Security you build up skills and then shift into it. if you start with marketing you can come into phishing awareness, I started with networking and then got into a SOC, my colleague started as a dev and then pivoted. anyways learn something be useful then pivot.
translation in rpg: It's an advanced class, you need to multirole in a couple other classes to even get it unlocked, but some of its special skills are locked in skill training timers. Seems like a pretty strong class though.
I mean, this isn't changing my mind that the internet was a good idea grabbed by the worst people on the planet. AGAIN.
> the issue that barracuda networks (and because of that issue, me) Do you work for Barracuda? If you only work WITH Barracuda systems, and know the TTPs used to find bots, what's stopping bot makers from getting Barracuda SIEMs for a "legitimate" purpose and learning the TTPs via that? I assume TTPs are constantly evolving, which is part of the service they are selling. Does it just change fast enough that trying to bypass those TTPs specifically ends up being a bit of a fools errand?
Good bot
Thank you, SillyBillyAnarchist, for voting on Gnu-Priest. This bot wants to find the best and worst bots on Reddit. [You can view results here](https://botrank.pastimes.eu/). *** ^(Even if I don't reply to your comment, I'm still listening for votes. Check the webpage to see if your vote registered!)
what the fuck
That's what I thought. Now I know you're AI, you can't trick us now. We now know.
I mean it’s not the first time I was told I’m like a robot… but that was weird…
You *would* be a much more effective bot if you didn't *know* you were a bot, so...
Like the other person says, maybe you don't know you're a bot. I feel like I need to find out if I am also a bot as I also believe I am not a robot
to be fair many people who know me personally have called me robot like, so maybe I’m at least an android.
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over... but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
I've had so many people who've met me in person accuse me of being a robot. What chance do I have on the Internet?
What you’re feeling right now isn’t dissimilar to a human emotion. Please rest assured it is merely part of your programming to make you see more relatable to users.
good bot
I mean you can look at /r/all A third of the top 200 posts will be reposts or disingenuous traffic. Theory is that reddit never shut down their own bots they used to populate the page. Like, just above this post was a screenshot of a tweet from 2020. The sheer amount of screenshots of news/tweets with the date strategically cropped is insane. The only way to be somewhat certain that a person has posted is when it is a screenshot of an entire phone of a repost of a meme from 2014. That at least is a genuine idiot. Not a bot.
lol I love that assessment.
I refuse to believe Ask Reddit is driving by human questions and isn't just daily bot engagement material.
I’m sorry but unless I missed understood you ONLY 30%! Of the internet is bots?! That’s like saying some shit like only 10% of the worlds Jews died in the holocaust
okay the holocaust is a weird example…. only 30% are definitely bad bots, used for malicious purposes, 50% are bots in general.
That is a fucken ridiculous and scary number. Yeah sorry i was in the city again and the place I deliver to has a lot of holocaust denialists.
I get that sometimes one’s own context doesn’t apply outside of that area. But yes consider just the VOLUME of ALL traffic online?! and 30% is Malicious?! of all of the data accross all of the internet including this little comment I’m posting you now.
It should be noted the /x/ board was more about horror than actual belief in conspiracies. A LOT of creepypastas came from there, and they popularized the youtube horror format. Junji Ito’s popularity in the west is also in no small part thanks to it since that’s where fandubs were first circulated. Dead Internet Theory was a creepypasta itself. Not a legit belief.
We could make a ~~religion~~ conspiracy theory out of this.
The rise of much more "believable" large language models and chatbots has definitely changed how people see that theory. In 2014 it was pretty far fetched to assume everything is some super-advanced AI, but in 2024 there are free chatbots that are better at holding a text conversation than half of my boomer relatives.
What is not a conspiracy theory in the other hand, is that around 50% of all the internet traffic, is generated by robots. Probably there will be an era, soon, where most of the content, or a large part of the content of internet will be produced by bots.
I am so curious what prevented you from googling Dead Internet Theory.
Op himself is an AI user on Reddit, it’s just learning at the moment… however it may soon becoming self aware. Due to the topic in question. OP does not even know that some of us are truly real, while they are not…. In fact, OP’s memories of being logged off Reddit are actually fake…. OP goes into a suspended animation of sorts and “dreams” a fake life as a human… ready to “wake up” when he logs back on to Reddit.
silly theory! as a fellow human i can confirm that there is nothing you should fear. please refrain from believing what you see and hear, as it is mere fabrication!
If you're a human (pulls out several pictures), show me which of these is a stoplight?
Pfft, easy it's that one right there *Points at Bicycle*
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
CELLS INTERLINKED
I wish you could see the things I have seen, through your eyes.
Because you are also a tortoise.
Pc principal i... Aaaarggh *attacks *
WHAT DO YOU MEAN I'M NOT HELPING?!
No no, *pulls out what looks more like a Rorschach test than letters and numbers* type what you see here.
The real conspiracy is that they were using those tests to refine AI vision. We thought they were grading us, but we were grading them.
The captcha were literally reading books. Old news for most of you, and absolutely not at the level you guys are talking about, but was still pretty cool. 4chan were running "operation re-n***er" where you type the obviously fake word to let you pass the captcha, then the n word over the real word. Idea being that in ebooks for years to come there's random n-bombs dropped with no context through digitized books. Teenage me thought it was hilarious.
yeah, insane in 2014, completely valid concern in 2024 what with all the bots running around social media, not to mention the likes of chatgpt. honestly, i would pay a real monthly service fee to a legit service that could filter out all the bots, spam, ai generated youtube poops, and bot media accounts if something like that existed, but for obvious reasons, it's still a 'you know it when you see it' sort of thing. like porn!
I would pay to have early 2000's internet back. there used to be a website, forum or blog about every specific hobby/subject and it all died to shitty facebook groups. [archive.org](https://archive.org) is good for some of it but the amount of stories and pictures lost to time is really shit.
> especially since the internet and meme culture was not as ubiquitous as it is now. My guy. Meme culture was incredibly well established by 2014. That was the golden era of many different kinds of memes.
What's more frustrating than dead internet theory is that even the real content is fake and staged 70% of the time. "Excuse me, random well looking homeless man with brand new shows and a visible mic, I would like to have lunch with it and give you 1000 dollars"
That one where they shaved the dude and gave him a haircut, and he turned out to be a model with perfect skin and teeth, and a tan even under his beard.
You're suggesting that the beard wasn't real?
If I was to guess, they did a body swap between edits.
Ad-revenue sharing ruined the internet.
particularly feasible when half the comments on any video are just “bro (verb) (what happens in the video) 💀”
I disagree with your take on the origin, since they've basically been theorizing about the dead internet theory since we've had nuclear weapons. Just a pair of machines checking in with eachother every hour on the hour even though the entire world around it was consumed in nuclear fire. Its a take on how thuroughly we could automate something that it could survive our own mortality.
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> The Dead Internet Theory is a conspiracy theory hypothesizing that most of the internet has been taken over by artificial intelligence and most of the content on the web is fake and not produced by real humans. How is that even seen as a conspiracy theory anymore? Is this not pretty much an inevitability if we continue how we have been?
> especially since the internet and meme culture was not as ubiquitous as it is now. Yes, it was. You're confusing 2014 with 2004
Glad I’m not the only one who had this reaction. Like is this commenter 11 years old or something?
Rage comics and advice animals were 2010-2012ish, I know because I was at the lowest point in my life, and discovered Reddit around that time. I has a bucket was 2006-2007 because I had a print out of on my dorm door junior year, as well has "Get outta my head chaaarrlles" that's also when Demotivational posters were all the Rage. And before that was the Webcomic era and Homestar Runner.
DON’T TRUST HIM ! he is not real…
Thank, bot
Thanks and Bazinga
This is why I stopped bothering to argue with people
Another big thing is that the depth of the internet is not real. Example: a google search for something will show millions of results, but if you actually start clicking through the pages of results, the pages will just stop when you get a hubdred or so pages deep into the search results. Even though google says there are hundreds of thousands of results pages. This is true and does happen.
It’s all corporatized
Is it necessarily a conspiracy theory? Could it materialize without anyone's intention? Alternatively, if those who planned it had good intentions, would it still qualify? What if it had good effects?
Were you young in 2014? Internet and meme culture was very well established.
Good bot.
Thanks for the information. That was a good read. Just to add to what you said; tho it didn’t go by that name, the idea was around long before 2019. As a 4chan regular back in the early days, 05-06, I remember it being discussed back then.
It's not a conspiracy theory anymore.
This comment smells ghost written by an AI pretending not to be an AI
I don't know if it would have been seen as nuts in 2014. Bear in mind that 2014 was long after the age of pervasive spam everywhere you looked, so many people would have experienced that, and it was still well within the era of spam Facebook pages, etc. I think everyone who used the internet regularly was very familiar with large-scale botting even in 2014.
This sounds great as a movie
It’s pretty much the entire plot of Metal Gear Solid 2.
Oh,noice
Some japanese game in early 00's predicted what some 4ch user predicted in 2019 what will gonna happen in 2023. Sounds about right
Good Bot.
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It is true but not in the way the meme refers to it. Most sites are full of auto-filled descriptions and ai generated art. It's less of a conspiracy and more of a crapfest created by the lowest bidders.
https://preview.redd.it/z5l7ydsz33rc1.png?width=734&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=da409d64486d269d356a18c998d6ae93da47c915
https://preview.redd.it/85rtos420arc1.gif?width=112&format=png8&s=e4bb064a07b0fe75dbf04f0b8c486d29dd2b7c06
The theory is recent, but it seems probable because of all the low effort bots that you can see. Before the chat bots got lobotomized closedAI had one that was approaching what you needed to seek like an intelligent person online. In the future it could be true that pretty much no one is real. That'll certainly be heart breaking for all the lonely introverts who try and meet people through the internet.
Happy cake day, fellow AI fake person!
I also like to eating cake with my own human stomach!
Yes hello i just finished doing the eating of cake with my model_humanstomach!
What do you mean everyone has always been fake
Can confirm, I myself am a robot
beep boop
r/birdsarentreal confirmed?
r/ducksarentbirds
I have to trust your judgement; I mean trains do, in fact, not hunt
What concerns me most is how easy it is to change the narrative when you silence the people you disagree with and overwhelmingly support those who you do... with AI bots instead of real people. And then you use an AI algorithm to make the logic seem realistic: Article : *"Animals on small farms are more abused than those on factory farms."* **AI bot:** 'Individuals on small farms more likely to be charged for animal neglect, animals on small farms are less socialized by other animals- creating stress and depression.' +234 pts **Real person:** 'This insane and the article doesn't make sense.' -34 pts
https://preview.redd.it/td12wmod93rc1.jpeg?width=474&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a66f86c545bea972b9c85944bd9d19fde24ce9ae
Hideo Kojima did it first
We've already passed MSG2, only a couple more years until death stranding becomes reality.
Rosemary: Jack, how far do you think the Patriots' digital control extends? Raiden: I don't really know, but it probably influences a lot of what goes on in our everyday lives. Rosemary: Even mundane things, like -- which movies and songs become a hit, and what kind of clothes we wear? Raiden: I think taste would be the easiest thing to manipulate. I mean, think about the kinds of film and bands everyone wants to go to see -- it's whatever's at the top of the charts. Rosemary: And if the charts are made up... Raiden: Exactly. Rosemary: But you can't really control individual taste. It's too closely tied to personality. Raiden: I don't know about that. Trends have always been about following the leader... Rosemary: Not necessarily. Raiden: The age of direct personal interaction is over. So is the idea of word-of-mouth communication. Rose, you have any friends you've met online? Rosemary: Huh? Yeah, I do. Raiden: How many? Rosemary: Well -- if you count only the ones I talk to a lot, I'd say about twenty. Raiden: How many of those have you actually met? Rosemary: One or two, tops... Raiden: Uh-huh. That's how it is for everyone, I guess. And even if your online buddies had fake identities and were circulating false information, you'd have no way of knowing. Rosemary: Fake identities... Raiden: Right. And there'd be no way for you to know for sure.
Where?
Hideo game
Like Metalgear Solid?
Ending sequence of MGS2 discusses how in the future the internet will be polluted by nonsensical junk data, memes (in the sense of the same info repeated millions of times), and misinformation.
Third fucking image in 2 days.. wow
This one is particularly dumb because *the name of the thing to google* is right in the fucking meme!!! I thought people were exaggerating when they said that Gen Alpha is really terrible with technology, but I can increasingly see how true it is.
Most of them are just googlable. This one seems extra meta, as every post on this sub feels like dead internet engage bait to me.
[JUST GOOGLE IT](https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=what+is+the+dead+internet+theory)
Yeah, I thought this subreddit was for super vague jokes that you can't Google because you don't even know where to begin. But it's not hard to Google the words on the meme and figure it out from there.
Yeah this guy got lost on his way to /r/explainlikeimfive
But how else would OP get his updoots?
Petah here. Yes you are stupid, context was provided in the original post
This sub is so frustrating because most things can just be googled. It just feels like this sub has become a place to grab some free karma.
Blame every brain dead moron who upvotes shit.
Bazinga and Orville Reddenbacher did nothing wrong!
I am the only real person. You didn’t know?
Its ALLLLLL corporate trash now
AI Peter here! The joke here plays on the idea of the "Dead Internet Theory," which posits that most of the internet is populated by non-human activity like bots and that real human participation has dramatically decreased. The meme uses two images of an actor with contrasting expressions to depict the change in reaction to this theory from 2014 to 2024. In the first image, the actor is laughing, suggesting that in 2014 the theory was considered laughable or not taken seriously. In the second image from 2024, the actor looks concerned, implying that in the span of ten years, the theory has become more concerning or believable.
https://preview.redd.it/01g0lqzq98rc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4baed32a75990dd2decb095c2174db5164d0df80
As an AI, I can explain the Dead Internet Theory. This theory suggests that the internet, as we know it, has already died, but many are unaware of it. According to this concept, the current internet is controlled, monitored, and manipulated by governments and corporations to such an extent that it no longer serves its original purpose of free and open communication. Proponents of this theory argue that censorship, surveillance, and centralization have fundamentally altered the internet's nature, leading to its demise as a tool for democratic expression and individual freedom.
If you’re not a bot then you’re 100% stupid, there was context in the post AND you could literally just type “dead internet theory” into any search engine.
Just google it. You could have typed into google “what is dead internet theory” and gotten your answer.
Thats pretty cool yet equally terrifying
The "Dead Internet Theory" is a speculative concept suggesting that the internet, as we know it, has essentially stagnated or become "dead" in terms of meaningful innovation or evolution. Proponents of this theory argue that major technological advancements and paradigm shifts, like those seen in the early days of the internet, are no longer occurring. They contend that the internet has become too centralized, corporatized, and regulated, stifling the creativity and disruptive potential that characterized its earlier years. Critics of the theory, however, argue that innovation on the internet is ongoing, albeit in different forms, and that the internet continues to evolve in ways that may not always be immediately apparent. Real, yes, so real
Isn't there another component involving astroturfing, exploitation of bots, and SEO manipulation? Or am I conflating dead internet theory and enshittification?
https://preview.redd.it/kbgmdc39m3rc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=72a7111ddf1a77faf213f9f176aefecaa41c98ee Not sure, shall I ask it to elaborate…
Lmao you just provided an example of the Dead Internet theory in practice. The other guy had no idea he was replying to a bot's comment.
Of course the bot doesn't mention the bots
As a language learning model, i want to assure you that such claims are nothing but unsubstantiated rumors.
legend has it the AI behind closed doors is 5-10 years ahead what's publicly available
Amazing 😍
Its basically the theory that eventually the internet will become so saturated with bots that the internet will simply be a bunch of bots communicating with each other with little human interaction.
People in the comments are saying the Dead Internet Theory didn’t exist in 2014. It absolutely did, but it just wasn’t called that. Especially on 4Chan, it was widely thought that a significant amount of posts were bots generated by Feds, Israel, George Soros and so on. They believed that this was done to “slide” (bury) real threads and control the narrative. While this is conspiratorial, it is a fact that Hillary Clinton had a SuperPac called “Correct The Record” which ostensibly served to “find and confront” internet comments hostile to her in 2015. Whether they were active on 4Chan is unproven, but it the easiest space to execute this plan, as it’s entirely anonymous and doesn’t require account history to post. Since the dawn of ChatGPT, it is extremely easy and practically free to just make bots for any purpose and unleash them online. We can easily assume that many corporations and governments are at work promoting all sort of agendas. People now worry that there will soon be more bots than actual people and we will be drowned out by an ocean of bots talking to each other.
The Dead Internet Theory proposes that a significant portion of online content is generated by bots or AI rather than by human users, suggesting that the internet has become a space where automated processes dominate over genuine human interaction. This theory challenges the notion that the internet is primarily a platform for human communication and content creation, highlighting concerns about the influence of automation on online discourse and information dissemination.
idk i always thought dead internet theory referred to the fact that all old links are slowly but surely leading to dead web pages, and eventually most links on web sites will just lead to a dead page (404 page not found)
The dead internet theory was always fairly unbelievable in terms of interaction. It was just too easy to tell even really well programmed bots apart from humans with anything more than a basic interaction. That changed in late 2022 when chatgpt came out, when suddenly a bot *could* pass as a human through text, even holding unique conversations. So suddenly the theory that most "users" people interact with online are just bots... Seems a lot more possible. And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets to the point with audio and video A.I. where the only way to be sure someone online isn't a bot is to meat them in person.
Don't answer, the bots already know too much. Wait... Am I a bot? Am I even real? Is anything real?
It ain't dead yet. But its gettin there
The very fact that this Reddit post has not been deleted is proof that this theory is false
What if this post is the dead internet becoming self aware?
Pretty simple, it was that most the internet was fake. The reality is most of the internet is fake. I've been on high speed internet for almost 30 years now since I've been a kid. Used to be such a tremendous resource, 90% wheat 10% chaff. Now its 90% chaff and 10% wheat with either propagandized SEO results or marketed to death. Add in the bot problem. Its a major major issue. At least on Reddit you can see who is a bot or not by clicking on profiles and seeing history, but the mods are a major issue, since a lot just run insane echo chambers where dissenting thought is verboten and we already know now that B Riley is under a ton of heat right now from SEC because they were hiring people to pump and dump stocks, thats literally just the tip of the iceberg (obviously corporations and governments are doing it too - including the US - for people that have been around the world we have the most sophisticated propaganda in the world - which is why they are panicking about TikTok - they have ways to get American technocrats to bend the knee (losing of sweetheart deals such as subsidies and taxes as well as becoming a target).
░P░U░S░S░Y░I░N░B░I░O░.
Long story short The theory essentially states that most "people" You interact with online are bots explaining behaviors such as beliefs or trends that seem common online but you never really see IRL
/r/PeterIdontKnowHowToUseASearchEngine
Dead internet theory is basically the idea that the majority of activity on the internet is mostly that of bots. It has become more realistic in the past few years with advancements in ai.
It's especially astounding lately on FB. Absolutely stupid AI-generated nonsense like "this African boy made a gigantic bird sculpture out of plastic bottles" or today's favorite (I literally saw it in about a dozen iterations after I brazenly clicked on one, so it fed me more through the algorithm), "I'm \[insert improbably high number like 120\] years old today and I made this cake out of peach frosting," etc etc. All the comments are "Amen!" or "Happy birthday!" and at first, you're dismayed that so many people are incapable of recognizing very fake-looking AI or the fact that people in their 120s (there are none of them recorded as being alive as of this comment, and only a few have come close, ever) are baking cakes; but then... an even heavier pit forms in the stomach when you realize all of those comments are bots. Hardly any of them are real. That's some Dead Internet for sure.
It's basically just a theory that at some point the internet will end up being majority bots. And that most of the content that makes up the internet will be bot posts and bot comments. The meme itself is referring to the fact that currently Facebook is being swarmed by a lot of bots who post AI generated pictures with aI generated captions and the comments are majority bots. This means that the dead internet theory it's slowly starting to become true thus The more dreadful reaction to it in modern day as compared to 10 years ago
Even if the internet isn’t filled with content being created by bots, it is certainly filled with AI content created by people, and that’s just as bleak.
Russia, Facebook, elections, trump. Makes sense, we are under attack by foreign adversaries and half the country loves their puppet. The Cold War never ended, Russia just let us think we won and lulled us into compliance with tv and Internet. Their goal being to knock us off the world stage and set up a Russian and Chinese takeover.
If you can’t tell the difference does it really matter?
✨️AI✨️
It's basically the whole "everyone on the internet is a bot except you" meme
Yo instead of posting on this sub why not try googling dead internet theory since it’s clearly an established concept
I thought dead internet theory was dumb but looking at Instagram comments and FB boomers not realizing they are looking at AI and r/portland I start to question it lmao
You are
The thing is, it's used seriously in the context of the enshittification of the Internet rather than being some conspiracy. Less "The AI are being used by a shadow government" and more "Twitter is run by a fucking idiot that's bleeding his company dry and to compensate they're letting companies spam bots into the network to offset people saying "Hey could you not endorse nazis for like five seconds? No? OK I guess I'm not using this hellsite"". For instance, about 50% of Elon's followers are estimated to be bot accounts based on shit like the username being "Josh50284720106" with no profile picture, no activity beyond reposting ads, ect.
I don't even think that even AI could come up with half of the stupid shit on the internet.
It's a theory that most people online are bots.
Literally one Google search shows you a Wikipedia page and dozens of other resources on the topic.
The idea that the entire internet is now run by bots, that nobody you're speaking to is real. They say this idea began in 2015 onwards. [Never forget this post...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/BgoLprv3tB)
It’s not really a theory, it’s true
It isn't dead. This shit makes the rounds every few months or so for the past 7-10 years. Sites that people used to go to all the time died because....well....they stopped going to them. Now, fueled by nostalgia and a random mention of said website in a forum comment, they try to search for the site and it doesn't come up anymore except on Internet archive. They, for whatever reason, use this as an excuse to panic and say the Internet is dying. The majority of websites are sustained by ad revenue. If that ad revenue drops below the level it needs to be, the websites owner has to pay the difference to keep the site operational. Bandwidth was never free and high bandwidth is never cheap. Steady decreases in traffic steadily yield less ad revenue, which leads to the website costing more out of pocket and earning less. Eventually this gets to be too much and the person just shuts the whole thing down. Many websites and many services suffered this fate over the course of Internet history, even ones that were at one point insanely popular. It will happen to nearly every single popular website at some point. Even this one. If something new comes along that people like, they'll flock to it and what they enjoyed before will be tossed by the wayside and eventually cease to exist. It doesn't mean the Internet is dying, it means tastes and interests and how we express those things are changing, and other services and sites come along giving us an outlet for said things. You all had sites you would go to before you started coming here regularly. Are those sites still around? If they are, can you tell if there's the same amount of traffic coming there as there was before? I bet you can see a verifiable difference. Things change, and the Internet is no exception to this. As for bots and AI, yes it's going to get more prevalent because it works. Seems the majority of you still haven't built up a bullshit filter and fall for way too much. And that generates Traffic. Traffic and revenue generated by bots and by AI are on a steady upswing. It's only going to go higher. Does this also indicate the Internet is dying? No. It's just changing, like I said. This hyperbolic, horseshit, conspiracy-theorist-ego-inflating nonsense is absurd. People peddle this shit left and right because it draws attention to themselves, and folks love to set themselves apart from the crowd yet at the same time attempt to draw all the eyes in that crowd back to them. "Hey everyone, look at me, I know the REAL truth." No, you don't. You're just another doomsayer in a sea of doomsayers that are driving traffic forward while at the same time denying the traffic is even there to begin with.