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[flagged] Dead Internet (2023) (darkfutura.substack.com)
36 points by KqAmJQ7 8 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 62 comments





The dead internet theory is very quickly becoming a reality on Twitter. Every clout chasing bluecheck now has their account wired up to an LLM which replies to others posts automatically to boost their engagement - Tweets are so short that they barely cost any tokens, so they can generate those replies by the thousands for next to nothing.

https://x.com/levelsio/status/1839992260341182647

https://x.com/levelsio/status/1840410820238270698


Stop feeding the troll.

And by troll I mean Elon


The main issue with that isn’t just the core concept, ie an ai that extends your ability to field preliminary conversation, but also the fact that llms currently can’t mimic you very well, so it just doesn’t work for this use case lol.

Recently I needed to create a facebook account to join a group for some volunteer related work. I haven’t had a facebook account for probably 8 years.

I knew the memes that facebook has become a bit of a wasteland but I was genuinely shocked by how bad it is. The “new account” experience is wild, having zero friends on an account just results in a torrent of spammy content. Sexist comics, AI generated garbage, just repulsive..


I love your username! I also had to make a fb account for work recently (after being off the platform since 2012) and even with a fake last name, work email and different phone number it managed to find and suggest as a friend: someone I went to university with _in another state_, who incidentally moved to the same city as me a few years later. There's no way they aren't maintaining shadow profiles and still accomplishing that. Aside from that, the feed is indeed an utter cesspool.

They maintain a shadow social graph, where they suggest friends to you which are more than one hop away.

I've been seeing people suggested as friends who are my customers at work. My FB account is pseudonymous, and has nobody work-related as a friend.

So - a few possibilities:

1. Someone at work tried to look me up by my cell, and they were friends with this person. (less likely)

2. I had a Facebook tab open when I connected to the VPN, and then someone at work who was friends with that person got associated with my egress IP since they connected to same VPN endpoint (more likely)

I have tested the IP address theory. Profile 1 connects to your home wifi network. Profile 2 on different machine connects to your wifi network. You now get friend recommendations of Profile 1's friends on Profile 2.

Nothing would surprise me when it comes to how Facebook builds its shadow profiles / shadow graphs. I wouldn't be surprised if they bought from data brokers and had things like your SSN's and historical home addresses and everything.


Díky! Yeah I had a similar experience as well, all the people it suggested were surprising.

I became interested in this clearly AI created "poorly" woman profile who would post just the most nothing questions "What's smells better, fresh baked bread or freshly cut grass?" That would have thousands of replies.

Least common denominator planet of doom.


Try youtube without an account or history. Even worse, on the smart tv in a hotel room.

The smart TVs in shared we-work like meeting rooms are a gamble now. At least it's usually something harmless like paw patrol.

Yeah it's a MrBeast-esque hellscape

My wife hadn’t had Facebook for years. She tried to make an account to use marketplace and it got immediately banned with no explanation.

I don’t know what’s going on with Facebook but I guess if you didn’t start using it 10+ years ago it’s too late now.


I'm in the same boat. Although I suppose I tried giving out as little legitimate information about myself as possible, so honestly I don't blame them too much for detecting somehow and blocking it (in my case specifically...)

I have a similar situation lol, I used a Facebook account almost a decade ago which I lost access to (email). Whenever I try to make a new account it instantly gets banned as a duplicate.

It's the same on Twitter/X, possibly even worse.

Instagram is a walled garden, as is LinkedIn.

I recently did the North Coast 500 miles around Scotland and when I was using wifi I was challenged often to prove I'm human. It got really tiresome and I ended up going back to mobile data just to avoid that.

Having access to a vast quantity of information at all times does not seem to stop authority figures from being ignorant of the law, anti-vaxxers from being ignorant of medicine or Flat Earthers from being ignorant of just about everything. It actually amplifies those groups.

I loved the olden days of the world and their dog having a personal website about whatever they wanted, which you could visit without being tracked or having to login. Oh, and I wish the Internet of Things wasn't still so shitty.


>Then, as the Obama Era unleashed a rogue-wave of cultural disintegration, birthing the modern Woke Era, with its attendant digital sequestrations and industrial-scale deplatforming, the ‘Web’ turned another critical corner in its descent toward moribundity. The now-dominant Big Tech Hall Monitors became riot-police and gatekeeper in one, smoting down the sunless pate of any poor schmo who dared lean an elbow on the hallowed sill of the ever-shrinking Overton Window.

Somehow I don't think you read the article.


This article expresses a common sentiment among those of us who grew up with web1. However, by now I think we've found our places where the internet is still fun. There's still some forums and chat rooms that keep things interesting without the constant barrage of advertising. This site is one of them, but there are a bunch of federated platforms out there now too that are fun to explore.

> However, by now I think we've found our places where the internet is still fun. There's still some forums and chat rooms that keep things interesting without the constant barrage of advertising.

I haven't. Internet is nothing more than an addiction for me. Internet is dead and misanthropic nowadays. It's soulless and corporate. It used to be fun, artistic, creative, and educational. Now it's neither of those, with extremely few exceptions like Wikipedia.

> This site is one of them, but there are a bunch of federated platforms out there now too that are fun to explore.

I read reddit and HN constantly because I seem to have an unhealthy compulsion to keep up with the news, politics, tech, and the world, but other than that I wouldn't say I like either site, or that they're fun.


>I haven't. Internet is nothing more than an addiction for me. Internet is dead and misanthropic nowadays. It's soulless and corporate. It used to be fun, artistic, creative, and educational. Now it's neither of those, with extremely few exceptions like Wikipedia.

I feel like the reality is that every recommendation algorithm have been cranked up to 11 to throw garbage at you. The "good old internet" is not completely gone, all the thing you mentioned, fun, artistic, creative & educational are still there.

I'd even say that when it come to educational it have actually massively gotten better, and still is, *but it is getting harder and harder to find it*.

Google search is garbage, Youtube throw you shorts clickbaity shit, so does twitter, and Facebook is a wasteland. Yet the interesting blogs are still there, the youtube content creators are still producing educational content, artists are still producing stuff.

*Search* has gotten worse. So you simply won't find as much as you used to, and your old channel is getting filled with SEO garbage and clickbait recommendation system preferences.


Yup. I have so many fond memories of the late 90s/early 00s web, but a feeling of being bored with the internet set in around 2014/2015 and now I'm just a current events junkie.

I feel the same way. I don't see it so much as an addiction as much as that the internet cratered everything around it -all the social is largely online, or was. Reading, entertainment -again, largely reliant on the internet in various ways.

Part of it, for me, is age and locale. If I was in LA or a large city I might feel like there's worthwhile things to do offline -but I'm not, and largely there isn't; not if you're single and older, at least.

So I hover around reddit, hn and various discords because what else am I going to do? Go clubbing? There's no clubs, and I'm too old beside.


I read Reddit and HN because they're there, but Reddit hellbans any account I try to make with no email, so I can't comment, and I'm gradually moving to Mastodon.

So many subs hellban young accounts to deal with spam. The only real way to get around it is create an account 6 months before you want to comment.


What are some places you miss which you feel allowed you to be creative or learn without advancing some corporate agenda?

Random one off forums. They were alive.

The thing is that before most of the Internet population was in those places, and granted the population was much smaller (with pretty good self-filtering). But now everyone is scattered in the social media meme hellscape, and those old cool places are mostly populated by greybeards (not necessarily old-aged, just old-timers).

Don't get me wrong, they are very cool people, and usually quite welcoming, but superficially so. Once you start trying to get into these communities a bit more seriously, you realize is just a big pile of old drama, discursive substance has long left, and it's just a bunch of weird old friends you don't know hanging out.

The most extreme instance of this are old MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons). Oh man, I really want them to be big thing again, they are so deep and interesting. Like old bulletin-boards, IRC and forums, but embedded in a living world. The closest we've gotten to an actual social metaverse world simulation is in text-form. Some are still relatively active, but most users are not engaged with the world anymore, it's mostly just a small chatroom with a musky odor.

I do agree that HN is a big exception to this, and there are indeed fresh federated platforms that are thriving. Mastodon is the main one, although I was never a big fan of the Twitter formula. And I couldn't get into Lemmy as a Reddit alternative, it's still too sparse and wild, the focus on semi-isolated server communities is both a strength and a significant source of disorientation.


My favorite weird place like this is themonsterchannel.com.

All the content comes from basically an m3u8 playlist, so you can scrape it if you like (which I do), but it's mostly older folks who just hang out and chat all day about old sci-fi/horror movies. Occasionally, someone I know from IRL way back shows up.


When it comes to old-web non-social patterns, the situation is much healthier I think. There are many blogs that are having their golden-age right now (Astral Codex comes to mind). I love what is being done in the smolweb, and the whole movement of Digital Gardens or Second Brains (100r.co is probably my favourite place on the internet).

Then, of course, you have Medium (rather enshitified now, but still big), and it's heir Substack (starting to get enshitified, but thriving) and newsletters in general. They are both huge and growing, long-form content is having a resurgence. Not to mention the phenomenon of podcasts, and let's not underestimate how much high-quality earnest content is on YouTube.

These are all modernized versions of old web patterns, first plain-old HTML content sites, and then blogs. And, well, ol' grandfather Radio, now greatly democratized.


Any in particular that you recommend?

Please don't. The few good forums still out there need to be protected from Eternal September. This is why a lot of people moved to things like closed Discord servers. Or some pages looking ugly and abandoned running some weird PHP forum software.

I doubt simply mentioning a forum on HN is going to lead to an influx of "noobs" who will descend upon them en masse. Those people are too wrapped up in their world of tiktok, Instagram, YouTube, etc.

A jaundiced, if not cataract-hazed view:

This thing we call The Internet has always been "funny smelling" if not a bit crap. Dead? Not really. Just more and more obvious about the nature of the creation.

It is the ultimate duality. Correct use requires holding two can-be-seen-as-divergent ideas in your head at once and then making a decision as to which better applies to the current situation. It simultaneously holds a lot of information -- asymptotically approaching the sum of all human knowledge. It is also a dark mirror, containing all the assorted sins and vagaries of humankind.

To say The Internet is Dead is, in a way, to say that Humanity is Dead. Maybe, in the minority, it is. Maybe that minority is encroaching on the majority and will reach parity. Or even surpass it.

This view is an easy path towards Nihilism. It is a struggle to acknowledge the negative and push back against it anyway.


I also got strong whiffs of nihilism from this post.

Your comment reminded me of Camus's interpretation of Sisyphus:

> As a life filled entirely of mundane and trivial labor, Sisyphus’s existence is meant to illustrate the futility (and absurdity) we confront in our own lives. Camus observes that a person’s life can become, essentially, a mundane routine: “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday according to the same rhythm…” (12-13). Yet, for Camus, Sisyphus is not to be pitied. Sisyphus represents the “absurd hero” because he chooses to live in the face of absurdity. This “choosing to live” is a matter of consciousness, for through his attitude and outlook, Sisyphus can free himself from his punishment and triumph over his situation without being able to change it. Sisyphus is aware of the full extent of his punishment: he is fully conscious of the fate imposed on him by the gods and the utter futility of his existence. His passion, freedom, and revolt, however, make him stronger than the punishment intended to crush him.

https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2019/05/01/camus-on-the-absur...


The tone of this article is a bit much, but fitting I suppose.

That said... the "dead internet conversation" has been going for a while. Current versions tend to be "gpt . I kind of think LLMs may just replace a lot of internet media, without the contrivance.

We still don't know how or if people will accept AI therapy, friendship, art or whatnot. Where or why being produced by a person matters. Online media (HN, reddit, twitter, etc) seems like the easier entry point. People like their friends and therapists. Most seem to hate the online media we are addicted to.

Is an LLM generated subreddit, to your tastes and interests something we would read? I suspect yes. It's a quicker sell, if you are replacing something people hate.

Media transitions (as we are already experiencing) have a lot of good and bad disruptive potential, typically. I'm beginning to suspect "media" will be LLMs' first major disruption.

   Pre-1990s : Early internet era
   1990s -2005: WWW/Nerd era 
   2005-2020 : Unwashed Masses era
   2020-present: Dead Internet era
   2025? : Custom content era

Oh god... another one of these digital preppers complaining about monetization by posting on Substack.

Giant wall of cunning metaphors to attract reader's attention just to end with a literal flop at the end:

> For now, I suppose, we can carry on...


"Digital prepper". Great phrase. Sums up my overall impression of this perfectly.

Very funny that this article starts with an ai-generated slop image instead of anything substantial.

The author talks of sharing ideas - I’d trust his more if he skipped the SEO bait


I'm curious if there is anyone who has any resources or anecdotal observations on why and how individuals/groups are spinning up bots that seems to be pushing the internet to this new reality. I've found a pretty interesting analysis of Meliorator[1], which is specific to foreign influence. But it seems like there are pieces missing for me.

Is engagement and ad revenue so great that it's worth setting up infrastructure to pump out this type of low effort 'content'?

1. https://www.ic3.gov/Media/News/2024/240709.pdf


Michael Sayman, the creator of SocialAI, said it best on a recent episode of The Vergecast. "We used to talk _through_ the Internet. Now we talk _to_ the Internet."

The host was as taken by the sentiment as I was. It's so succinct.

I gotta say, the episode got me to try SocialAI — literally "what if twitter was just bots". And it's like yeah — this is what we've made. This is indistinguishable from modern twitter. It's a great place to talk into the void. The fact that we've made social media a pillar of modern society… idk. Hate it.


pretty much Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message"

> filled our heads with candied dreams of endlessly-spanning information super-highways

* https://www.wikipedia.org

* https://www.openstreetmap.org

* https://github.com

* https://data.gov

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org

* https://ourworldindata.org

* ...

Plus the countless documentation websites that we technical writers lovingly toil away at day-in and day-out.

If you implicitly focus on consumer websites, then sure, there is a lot to be pessimistic about. But what professional in any field would say that they had easier access to information 34 years ago than today? How can we say that the information superhighway is not "mission accomplished" in that case? Or maybe the claim is that the information superhighway was most efficient in 2005 and we have regressed since that peak? Are we just upset because some people in the 90s set the unrealistic expectation that the internet would fix literally every bad thing about society and we bought into that silly claim?


We could see it coming, right?, as usenet was taken over by spam and "binaries". https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html "by God I KNOW what this network is for, and you can't have it" is painful to read today. Note this is from 1998. But why would we think the web would be any different?

Any form of communication intended for humans will eventually be used for spam. That should be easy to refer to as so-and-so's law, but I can't find anyone to attribute it to.

The one observation I have is that real-time communication platforms (IRC back in the day, Discord/Slack now) seem to be more resilient if only because obvious spam can be nuked by a mod right away. Of course this just means spammers have to be more subtle, we shouldn't be pretending that these platforms are spam-free.

It's the text chat equivalent of leaving a brand name soda on a table in a movie. Some, for example, game publisher can just have bots go onto Discord and talk about "hey I heard [new game] is getting pretty good reviews".


But wait, there's more! A lot of community and tribal knowledge is being locked away in various Discord servers.

Not to mention, poorly formatted/organized and to be randomly deleted or removed without warning with all that information lost.

People should look into Gemini, I have been moving my page there with one section left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

Plus gopher, IRC and USENET still exists and there are plenty of people still using it. But some USENET news groups are a political cesspool.

True, no pretty pictures but gemini has a lot of unique and interesting capsules.


"Dark forests" and "flying castles" are both essays worth a read here.

Yes the internet commons is becoming a swamp but that doesn't mean the internet is as a whole. There are private places, closed groups, little bastions of wholesome functional community.

I encourage you to run one or at least join one. Do good work, meet good people, be good to each other.


Yes, yes, you have a large vocabulary and a lawn to chase them kids off of, good on you. In the meanwhile, I hang out on Reddit, Thingiverse, a diversity of wikis, and learn lots of interesting and curious things from YouTube videos. The internet is, and has always been, what you make of it.

I remember back in the day these ad companies would pay you directly to run an ad bar on your screen.

OMG, I forgot about that. I ran that, and they had a pyramid scheme attached for referrals as well. I made a good hundred bucks as a kid.

I think they had another where they would give you a PC but you couldn't uninstall the ad bar.


The author has some interesting articles about the Ukrainian War.

A lot of social media, but especially FB, is being deluged with low-effort AI slop. Man-made horrors beyond your comprehension, and tens of thousands of bots upvoting or commenting the slop ("amen").

I see some interesting article on any of the major news papers, head to the comment section on their FB page, which is filled with pro-Trump posts from users with south-Asian or African locations. There's just bots absolutely everywhere.

To think that FB either can't, or just doesn't want to filter out this garbage.

I strictly use FB for the closes groups that have replaced many of the older forums, or local groups/pages for information and buying/selling.

EDIT: examples can be found here https://x.com/facebookaislop


> To think that FB either can't, or just doesn't want to filter out this garbage.

Facebook is literally paying to have it made:

https://archive.is/https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-a... (https://archive.is/YLUOK):

> Much like similar programs at TikTok and Twitter, Facebook’s Creator Bonus Program makes direct payments to people who successfully go viral on Meta platforms, and is meant to incentivize influencers and content creators to post high-quality content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Meta’s bonus program is “invite only,” but countless of the instructional videos I saw show that consistent posting over time will eventually get an account or page invited to the program.

> ...

> I sent Meta a series of AI-generated pages and content that had gone megaviral on my feed, as well as a series of questions about the creators program bonus and its stance on AI content. This included AI-generated images of Jesus that had 100,000 likes, an image of a family crying outside of a hut in the pouring rain, and AI images of Wonder Woman with semen in her hair and face. A Meta spokesperson told me that some of this content is not in violation of its policies, that payouts for the content I sent them were low, and that, while some of the images violated its content policies, many of them did not. They said that as long as the content is being consumed and liked by real people, is not being boosted inauthentically (with bots, for example) and does not violate Facebook’s community standards, then the program is working as intended.

> "We encourage creators to use AI tools to produce high-quality content that meets all our Community Standards, and we take action against those who attempt to drive traffic using inauthentic engagement whether they use AI or not,” the Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “We know bad actors adapt their tactics to evade our rules, so we are always working to improve our detection and enforcement."


Complains about monetisation... and end with tip jar. Oh the irony

There are so many avenues to fixing this, but the bottom line is this Age of Automatons is very appealing to the global aristocracy who can use it to overwhelm democracy and push their propaganda like never before.

It's a feature, not a bug, to those in power.


"At that golden fin de siècle of Y2K, where promised dreams felt limitless and infinite beneath the neon daze of confetti-striped streets, we looked ahead to a new age brimming with open expansiveness, optimistic"

GenX here, grew up in heyday. Drank the cool aid. Still dream wistfully about the past. The kids these days don't have any of the optimism of the internet revolution, they grew up with it and thus it is just another medium, something more to 'get away from'.

The enshitification is taking over everywhere.

Can enshitification be stopped?

It seems like recently the number of advertisements suddenly grew and now take 80% of the screen. Seems like not long ago there was one popup, now there is half dozen. And they move the screen around to cause text to jump around, unable to read at all.


You should immediately install an adblock extension

people have been saying this since we first migrated away from listserv. look, the corporate influence on the internet has absolutely made it worse and continues to make it less accessible to humans but the authors overarching world view is leaking in here. its not the "woke mind virus" its profit motive pure and simple. the dead internet theory is often best viewed through platforms owned and operated by people who believe the same underlying things as the author.

The author also completely lost me with their anti-woke fixation:

“Transfixed, I sat watching the almost hypnotic rumblings of a transgender alt-right, conservative, Republican who was anti-trans rights. It was immaterial whether I agreed with them or not—the simple fact of knowing such outright interesting, transgressive voices even existed”

Outright interesting, transgressive voices. Lol. So outright interesting being yet another alt-right reactionary on the internet. Give me a break. I find this viewpoint forced on me on Youtube by watching gaming videos. I have no idea what they find so refreshing about it.


I absolutely agree with you on this. I definitely feel like the viewpoint is forced on me on all social media and all media with a social component (like youtube!)

To digress a bit about your last sentence: my opinion, though, is that they don't find it refreshing.

I think this is an example of the subtle manipulations of language people who are knowingly reactionary do all the time. Like many, they have an Agenda and they want to get it done, but since they know that they often can not openly discuss what they want the world around them to look like in plain terms they start to adopt the cover of things like "free speech" and "transgressive voices."


It sounds like he stumbled across Blaire White, whose views really do stand out as an oddity amongst both the conservatives and the trans-identifying. I can see why the author found this interesting.



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