459
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
459 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
79983 readers
4029 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is basically Dead Internet Theory happening for real but in a weird creepy dystopian black mirror style way.
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.