[HN Gopher] Dead Internet Theory
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Dead Internet Theory
Author : skwee357
Score : 40 points
Date : 2026-01-18 20:19 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kudmitry.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kudmitry.com)
| chrisjj wrote:
| > The notorious "you are absolutely right", which no-living human
| ever used before, at-least not that I know of
|
| What should we conclude from those two extraneous dashes....
| skwee357 wrote:
| That I'm a real human being that is stupid in English
| sometimes? :)
| chrisjj wrote:
| That's just what an AI _would_ say :)
|
| Nice article, though. Thanks.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The funny thing is I knew people that used the phrase 'you're
| absolutely right' very commonly...
|
| They were sales people, and part of the pitch was getting the
| buyer to come to a particular idea "all on their own" then make
| them feel good on how smart they were.
|
| The other funny thing on EM dashes is there are a number of
| HN'ers that use them, and I've seen them called bots. But when
| you dig deep in their posts they've had EM dashes 10 years
| back... Unless they are way ahead of the game in LLMs, it's a
| safe bet they are human.
|
| These phrases came from somewhere, and when you look at large
| enough populations you're going to find people that just
| naturally align with how LLMs also talk.
|
| This said, when the number of people that talk like that become
| too high, then the statistical likelihood they are all human
| drops considerably.
| al_borland wrote:
| > part of the pitch was getting the buyer to come to a
| particular idea "all on their own" then make them feel good
| on how smart they were.
|
| I can usually tell when someone is leading like this and I
| resent them for trying to manipulate me. I start giving the
| opposite answer they're looking for out of spite.
|
| I've also had AI do this to me. At the end of it all, I asked
| why it didn't just give me the answer up front. It was a bit
| of a conspiracy theory, and it said I'd believe it more if I
| was lead there to think I got there on my own with a bunch of
| context, rather than being told something fairly outlandish
| from the start. That fact that AI does this to better
| reinforce the belief in conspiracy theories is not good.
| 1bpp wrote:
| An LLM cannot explain itself and its explanations have no
| relation to what actually caused the text to be generated.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I use them -but I generally use the short version (I'm lazy),
| while AI likes the long version (which is correct -my version
| is not).
| malfist wrote:
| You don't use em dashes then, you use en dash.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I think they are saying they are using an en dash where
| they should use an em dash.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yup. Note that I didn't name the dash.
| masswerk wrote:
| I'm a confessing user of em-dashes (or en-dashes in fonts
| that feature overly accentuated em-dashes). It's actually
| kind of hard to not use them, if you've ever worked with
| typography and know your dashes and hyphenations. --[sic!]
| Also, those dashes are conveniently accessible on a Mac
| keyboard. There may be some Win/PC bias in the em-dash
| giveaway theory.
| lizknope wrote:
| Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted.
|
| The API protest in 2023 took away tools from moderators. I
| noticed increased bot activity after that.
|
| The IPO in 2024 means that they need to increase revenue to
| justify the stock price. So they allow even more bots to increase
| traffic which drives up ad revenue. I think they purposely make
| the search engine bad to encourage people to make more posts
| which increases page views and ad revenue. If it was easy to find
| an answer then they would get less money.
|
| At this point I think reddit themselves are creating the bots.
| The posts and questions are so repetitive. I've unsubscribed to a
| bunch of subs because of this.
| al_borland wrote:
| Wouldn't taking the API away hurt the bots?
| metalliqaz wrote:
| the bots just scrape
| alex1138 wrote:
| Steve Huffman is an awful CEO. With that being said I've always
| been curious how the rest of the industry (for example, the
| web-wide practice of autoplaying videos) was constructed to
| catch up with Facebook's fraudulent metrics. Their IPO (and
| Zuckerberg is certainly known to lie about things) was possibly
| fraud and we know that they lied about their own video metrics
| (to the point it's suspected CollegeHumor shut down because of
| it)
| clearleaf wrote:
| It's been really sad to see reddit go like this because it was
| pretty much the last bastion of the human internet. I hated
| reddit back in the day but later got into it for that reason.
| It's why all our web searches turned into "cake recipe reddit."
| But boy did they throw it in the garbage fast. One of their new
| features is you can read AI generated questions with AI
| generated answers. What could the purpose of that possibly be?
| We still have the old posts... for the most part (a lot of
| answers were purged during the protest) but what's left of it
| is also slipping away fast for various reasons. Maybe I'll try
| to get back into gemini protocol or something.
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| Isn't showing ads to bots...pointless?
| lizknope wrote:
| If the advertisers don't know the difference between a human
| and a bot then they will still pay money to display the ad.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| The biggest change reddit made was ignoring subscriptions and
| just showing anything the algorithm thinks you will like.
| Resulting in complete no name subreddits showing on your front
| page. Meaning moderators no longer control content for quality,
| which is both a good and bad thing, but it means more garbage
| makes it to your front page.
| bananapub wrote:
| why would you look at the "front page" if you only wanted to
| see things you subscribed to? that's what the "latest" and
| whatever the other one is for.
|
| they have definitely made reddit far worse in lots of ways,
| but not this one.
| chongli wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I was on the Reddit front page
| and I use the site pretty much daily. I only look at specific
| subreddit pages (barely a fraction of what I'm subscribed
| to).
|
| These are some pretty niche communities with only a few dozen
| comments per day at most. If Reddit becomes inhospitable to
| them then I'll abandon the site entirely.
| imglorp wrote:
| > allow even more bots to increase traffic which drives up ad
| revenue
|
| Isn't that just fraud?
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| It is. Reddit is probably 99% fraud/bots at this point.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm think you are overestimating humanity.
|
| At the moment I am on a personal finance kick. Once in awhile I
| find myself in the bogleheads Reddit. If you don't know
| bogleheads have a cult-like worship of the founder of vanguard,
| whose advice, shockingly, is to buy index funds and never sell.
|
| Most of it is people arguing about VOO vs VTI vs VT. (lol) But
| people come in with their crazy scenarios, which are all varied
| too much to be a bot, although the answer could easily be given
| by one!
| alphazard wrote:
| The reddit bot story has been an interesting thing to follow.
| Either reddit is lying about views, or more that > 99% of views
| are from bots, or click through conversion of reddit humans is
| like 2 orders of magnitude lower than the typical human.
|
| If they show those view numbers to advertisers, then it's
| fraud, especially if they know that the views are bots. What's
| also surprising is the advertisers should realize they are
| getting low conversion and stop buying reddit ads.
|
| I suspect that company is a whistleblower away from an enormous
| scandal.
| swed420 wrote:
| > Bots have ruined reddit but that is what the owners wanted.
|
| Adding the option to hide profile comments/posts was also a
| terrible move for several reasons.
| secretsatan wrote:
| I'm a bit scared of this theory, i think it will be true, ai will
| eat the internet, then they'll paywall it.
|
| Innovation outside of rich coorps will end. No one will visit
| forums, innovation will die in a vacuum, only the richest will
| have access to what the internet was, raw innovation will be
| mined through EULAs, people striving to make things will just
| have ideas stolen as a matter of course.
| therobots927 wrote:
| That's why we need a parallel internet.
| pupppet wrote:
| AOL Humans Online
| ageedizzle wrote:
| What safeguards would be in place to prevent this parallel
| internet from also, with time, becoming a dead internet?
| malfist wrote:
| When it becomes a dead parallel internet, we'll make a
| internet'' and go again
| secretsatan wrote:
| What would stop them from scraping it and infecting it?
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Good post, Thank you. May I say Dead, Toxic Internet? With social
| media adding the toxicity. The Enshittification theory by Cory
| Doctorow sums up the process of how this unfolds (look it up on
| Wikipedia).
| gmuslera wrote:
| In one hand, we are past the Turing Test definition if we can't
| distinguish if we are talking with an AI or a real human or more
| things that were rampant on internet previously, like spam and
| scam campaigns, targeted opinion manipulation, or a lot of other
| things that weren't, let's say, an honest opinion of the single
| person that could be identified with an account.
|
| In the other hand, that we can't tell don't speak so good about
| AIs as speak so bad about most of our (at least online)
| interaction. How much of the (Thinking Fast and Slow) System 2
| I'm putting in this words? How much is repeating and combining
| patterns giving a direction pretty much like a LLM does? In the
| end, that is what most of internet interactions are comprised of,
| done directly by humans, algorithms or other ways.
|
| There are bits and pieces of exceptions to that rule, and maybe
| closer to the beginning, before widespread use, there was a
| bigger percentage, but today, in the big numbers the usage is not
| so different from what LLMs does.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Much like someone from Schaumburg Illinois can say they are from
| Chicago, Hacker News can call itself social media. You fly that
| flag. Don't let anyone stop you.
| ex3ndr wrote:
| I am curious when we will land dead github theory? I am looking
| at growing of self hosted projects and it seems many of them are
| simply AI slop now or slowly moving there.
| heliumtera wrote:
| But what about the children improving their productivity 10x?
| What about their workflows?
|
| Think of the children!!!
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(page generated 2026-01-18 23:00 UTC)