https://www.adriankrebs.ch/blog/dead-internet/

Adrian Krebs
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The dead Internet is not a theory anymore.

Bots have taken over

Mar 11, 2026

I recently invited a job applicant to a first-round interview. Their
CV looked promising and my AI slop detection didn't go off. But then
I got this reply:

job applicant

This made me realize that the dead Internet arrived faster than
expected. A few other purely qualitative examples confirmed the
feeling.

HackerNews

HN now restricts ShowHN for new accounts after an influx of
vibe-coded and low-quality ShowHN submissions.

reddit

Coincidentally as I'm writing this, HN also just updated their
guidelines with the following rule:

    Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for
    conversation between humans.

Reddit

When I revisited an old Reddit post about a sideproject of mine, I
found bots clearly astroturfing a SaaS product in the comments. These
profiles hide their comments on their accounts, but it's easy to find
hundreds of similar comments.

reddit

LinkedIn

On the rare occasion I open LinkedIn, my timeline is mostly
AI-generated slop among very few actually interesting professional
updates.

linkedin

GitHub

And of course let's not forget AI spamming OSS repos with nonsensical
PRs. What's even funnier is when the reviewer turns out to be AI too.

github

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Can we go back to an internet like this? I guess we can't.

(c) 2026 Adrian Krebs