full image - Repost: Is Google a Potemkin village? Why are YouTube comments so terrible? Why is Reddit a hivemind? The Dead Internet Theory. (from Reddit.com, Is Google a Potemkin village? Why are YouTube comments so terrible? Why is Reddit a hivemind? The Dead Internet Theory.)
Mining:
Exchanges:
Donations:
Try to do this experiment yourself:I typed "pizza" into Google. 916 million results. That's a lot of results, but the internet is big, so it could be true, right?So I started clicking on "next page". There's 10 links per page, so with 916 million results, there should be 9.2 million pages to click through.However, someting weird happened. When I reached page 22, that was the end. After 215 links, I reached the end of Google. And at the top, the text changed. It no longer said it has almost a billion results, it just said "215 results".On the last page, I was getting random news articles that only used the word "pizza" once, or links to sites of random Romanian pizzerias. Does Google, which is so often praised because of its fantastic algorithm, really only have 200 results more relevant to me than a random Romanian pizzeria? (I don't live in Romania or anywhere near it.)I did some more experiments with different search terms, and I never managed to get past 300.Why is this? What happened to the other billion or so results, and what are the implications of this?The dead internet theoryThe dead internet theory is the theory that states the internet is dead. It is mostly populated by bots and corporations, any content made by regular people quickly dies, and everything is solely geared towards increasing the money/power/influence of those that control it. This theory consists of 3 parts:BotsInternet RotAlgorithmsI will explain them one by one:BotsBots are everywhere. Many sources say something different, but somewhere between 50% and 70% of internet traffic comes from bots. And remember, bots don't consume. Bots don't listen to music, read news articles or watch YouTube videos. Bots only produce. Produce comments, produce posts, produce Tweets, produce likes, produce reviews. Bots do stuff. If 50% of traffic comes from bots that all produce, and 50% comes from humans that mostly consume, the majority of content is made by bots.Have you ever wondered where all the training for talking AI is? Self-driving car AI needed so much training that they made captchas, billions of internet users needed to click the traffic lights or the trucks every day in order to get self-driving cars to work. Yet having conversations, something way more difficult than detecting the crosswalks, has been achieved by companies like Google and Facebook before good self-driving cars. How? Where were the captchas that required you to have a conversation with an AI?The truth is, you have been doing that without even noticing. You have been speaking to bots.YouTube comments have a reputation of being worse than any other platform. Well, they used to. Their comments have been getting better, because the neural network is becoming smarter. Isn't it weird how the company who's the market leader in neural networks and AI suddenly got an influx of many low quality repetitive comments?When the bots get to the level that they can convincingly mimic humans (some might argue that they already have), they will gain unlimited influence.Bots: Political PropagandaIn real life, I have met only a handful of nazis, or militant 4th wave feminists, or socialists, or alt-righters in my life. Most people are normal people with. Yet on Reddit, everyone is an extremist.Political propaganda is a billion dollar industry. Google is not the only one with bots, many companies and organisations have them, and Reddit is just a battlefield between all of them.Political organisations with every leaning and opinion imaginable are using these bots to capture territory. Every subreddit, YouTube comment section and Twitter hashtag is a battlefield they want to capture. Why? Normalisation. These organisations are secretly waging wars with millions of bots downvoting each other, replying to each other, things like that.The more common your opinion is, the more it gets normalised. It becomes normal, and people accept it. This is not a left wing or right wing thing, every group wants the more extreme versions of their opinions to become normalised so their actual views are seen as moderates. If someone right now wants to half all taxes, it would be seen as madness. But if a mainstream group suddenly pops up that wants to completely abolish taxes, suddenly halving taxes seems like a reasonable compromise. The Overton window has shifted.Internet RotAnyone who has ever read an old Reddit thread or blog post knows the pain of internet rot. You have a niche problem and after an hour of searching you find an old thread, with a step by step explanation of how to solve it. Only problem is, those steps are images. And each image has now turned into the default "TinyPic has shut down" image.A few years ago, 39% of URLs used in Supreme Courts cases no longer pointed anywhere, and as websites only shut down and rarely come back online that number will only grow. 30% of web citations in scientific journals are no longer available. This is called internet rot. It consists of two types, content drift, the moving of pages to other places, and link rot, a page going offline altogether, because the owner no longer wanted it, or the website went offline, or the company behind it went bankrupt, or something like that.And remember, the internet is like a web of interconnected nodes. The connections between them are called "links", because they link the nodes. If one node dies, a whole cluster of nodes can become separated from the rest of the internet and die. While the narrative is that the internet has only been getting bigger and bigger, the opposite is true. Websites are dying faster than they are being created, and as a result everyone uses the same 10 social media sites.This is where the Google search experiment of the beginning comes into play. Yes, I'm sure most obscure websites are somewhere deep inside the Google database. But they are unfindeable. Unless you have the exact title of the page it doesn't show up on Google, and at that point it's not much better than just typing in the URL. Those sites are, for all intents and purposes, completely split from the rest of the internet. There are no links leading there. And when they no longer are linked to anything, they become islands, they get no new users, and they quickly die.Only websites approved by Google are allowed to exist, and before you go "but different search engines exist" all other search engines combined make up for about 5% of search traffic.AlgorithmsThe same search terms can give you completely different results. But it goes further than that. On platforms like TikTok and YouTube, the comments you see can differ depending on what account you're watching from. If you have used TikTok, you probably recognise this: you are right wing, and you see a left wing video. You open the comments, and every comment is talking about how right wing people are getting angry in the comments. But you scroll, and you scroll, and you literally can't even find one of these comments. This goes both ways, a left wing person would experience the same on right wing posts. You are only shown comments that you disagree with, that make you angry, because that's what keeps you on the platform longer.This goes into conspiracy territory, but some people have even said that things like view counts, number of likes, number of comments, things like that can differ depending on who's viewing it. So a left wing person seeing a left wing post would see it as controversial and with lots of right wing hate comments, because that's what makes them angry, whereas a right wing person seeing that exact post sees it as unanimously supported with supportive comments, because that's what makes them angry.ConclusionThe internet is dead. You are barely even interacting with other humans anymore. Most comments are by bots, the Reddit frontpage is moderated by Reddit admins, sites give likes/views to content they support to make it appear more popular, and everything is just there to make you spend time on the platform. That's it. The internet is dead.
Social Media Icons