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AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it's getting weird fast
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
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This is basically Dead Internet Theory happening for real but in a weird creepy dystopian black mirror style way.
I always laugh heartily when folks reference this theory. I came from gen 0 Internet days. Long before the first LLM ever consumed a token, the Internet had already been killed. Geocities, tripod, DOZENS of search engines, web rings, communities, ALL self organized. E commerce did not exist. Perl via cgi-bin was how dynamic things happened. JavaScript was a clock.
AI did not kill it, WE DID. We monetized it all and now it feels cheap and artificial and bought, and not sincere and thoughtful and perfectly imperfect. Social media, and the artificial importance of "engagement" has done more damage to this part of our shared culture than any autocorrect-on-steroids has.
I mean, the only way Dead Internet Theory could ever possibly be interpreted was weird creepy and dystopian, but yes, we're just making it much, much more real, faster and faster.
We're gonna need the Blackwall from CP77 fairly soon, at this rate.
What is the Dead Internet Theory?
Youre not on the internet interacting with others. Instead, youre back and forth with a purely artificial "online" environment.
The version I originally heard was not that its like, completely 100% not real people and instead is some kind of bot or something like that, but just that its increasingly more and more proportional internet traffic is like that.
A couple of years ago there were a few reports about just how much traffic on the internet is some kind of automated web scraper, some kind of automated system pinging some other kind of automated system... and then also how many accounts on forums or reddit or twitch or whatnot were not 'real' accounts, but were either bots or paid trolls of some kind... vs genuine human traffic by actual people using the internet in some way.
I guess a bunch of people oversimplified that a bit to just fit into some kind of creepy pasta / simulation theory /solipsism type narrative.
But either way, now both scenarios are converging toward being more true at the same time, as... seemingly 90% of people are either easily transfixed or fooled by LLM produced content of some kind... and yeah, we are getting closer and closer to it being difficult to tell, on most popular platforms, whether you are engaging with a real person or not.
Also, agruably... the entire point of 'the algorithm' on any corpo social media, tiktok, insta, facebook, etc... the whole point of those has always been to piegeon hole each user into their own little curated content feedback loop, their own personal content/advertising pocket dimension.
I guess it just had to get more extreme for people to realize how bad this can be.