I just wanted to peek at the front page. I guess they don’t want people to use their shit anymore. I’m starting to believe in the dead internet theory.

  • yhvr
    180·
    6 months ago

    While I do agree that this is bad, I’m a little confused—what does this have to do with dead internet theory? Doesn’t that relate to users being bots?

    • 3volverOP
      160·
      6 months ago

      That no one really uses reddit, that it’s dominated by bots masquerading as real people.

      • Onii-Chan
        180·
        6 months ago

        I swear you can actually spot entire chains of comments consisting of only bots replying to other bots on every single submission that makes it to the front page. It’s baffling how fast and hard reddit has fallen.

        • RandomlyRight
          40·
          6 months ago

          Do you have an example? I’m genuinely curious, I’ve heard a lot about this theory but can’t really imagine how you would differentiate bots from mindless redditors farming for karma by saying „This.“

          • DarkThoughts
            51·
            6 months ago

            The obvious ones are simple repost bots. They start with 1 account reposting some popular submission, then you’ll likely find at least 1 or more other accounts in the comments reposting a popular comment from the original post. They typically are created at the same time and have a similar pattern of maybe a handful of comments and submissions. When I was still using Reddit I saw them all the time on /r/all. Nowadays you also find a lot of bots reposting someone else’s comment in the same chain, maybe with slight grammatical changes. There’s some people and even a bot account that call those accounts out. I’ve seen a metric shitton of this happening since the last big shitstorm (which also really changed the content on /r/all for the worse).

            I think LLM based ones are probably harder to spot because they would sound a lot more natural and their profiles would look more organic.