[houseplant]

I watched a great video essay about this. Bots to create fake articles, bots to defect fake articles, bots to use common word salad to evade detection, bots detecting the word salad, bots to make comments on articles, bots to upvote those comments, bots to aggregate these articles and generate articles out of the comments, bots to rip off and change a bit of the wording of an article so they could repost the article, bots creating ads to be seen by other bots, bots to register clicks from other bots, bots creating ads solely to game clicks from other bots...

when I think about "the dead internet theory", this is what I imagine. all of this happening over top of our heads as we chat on a forum, out of the way.

the essay mentioned a comic series called BLAME, in which machines programmed to build cities, buildings, infrastructure, got derailed after humanity perished, endlessly creating walkways and stairs and buildings to nowhere, for nobody, forever unempeded, as they were programmed. Much of it makes no sense, like the Winchester House's stairs into solid wall etc, but it doesn't matter because it's all just being done according to their railroaded programming.

wasn't like 70% of the activity on Twitter during the last superbowl all just bot-related traffic?

[lloeki]

> the essay mentioned a comic series called BLAME, in which machines programmed to build cities, buildings, infrastructure, got derailed after humanity perished, endlessly creating walkways and stairs and buildings to nowhere, for nobody, forever unempeded, as they were programmed.

This is BLAME! (with the bang) by Tsutomu Nihei. There's a one tankobon prequel: NOISE.

Definitely a recommended read. The art is magnificent, the mastery of perspective incredible, managing to give you a sense of the unconceivable scale of the megastructure and by way of consequence, the mind-boggling energy involved in some events. It made me feel vertigo in spite of the small tankobon pages. The storytelling is top notch: few words, but a very complex story and setting connected through a ton of small details.

SNIKT! is a crossover with Wolferine (or rather, Logan), an unexpectedly excellent rendition of the character.

[lucianbr]

I can't see any other ending for this than people simply giving up on using social networks, at least those that exist now and exhibit this phenomenon.

I feel that in search of a few more dollars from engagement, they are slowly killing their main product. People will eventually learn that this is not a useful thing, and avoid it, although it happens slow. But once this enters the mainstream consciousness, it's over.

Maybe other social networks will appear, that will somehow guarantee you are interacting with humans, or maybe something else will take their place. But anyone who thinks they can extract value from humans longterm by drowning them in machine generated nonsense is wrong. People will adapt.

[houseplant]

the more I think about it the more I believe people will, or should at least, return to the OLD internet... things like BBS forums, RSS feeds of people's personal websites or blogs, webrings... things that haven't been completely and totally usurped by ads to turn us into content cows.

I hate that I find myself thinking, it really was better back then

[JoachimS]

And the Cambrian explosion, exponential development this triggers. Esp with AI driving the development (evolution) of these bots, detection mechanism, evasion mechanism, optimization of ROI. Including testing ways to improve extraction of the asset called 'money' - from the abstract thing called 'humans' and their agents.

We meat sacks don't stand a chance. We need to evolve.

[130e13a]

do you have a link to the video essay you're referencing?

[houseplant]

Sure. I didn't want to directly link it without being asked because I didn't want to seem like I was promoting anything or anyone, but it's this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXGjwf6zUWY

[tivert]

> when I think about "the dead internet theory", this is what I imagine. all of this happening over top of our heads as we chat on a forum, out of the way.

It won't necessarily be "over top of our heads as we chat on a forum, out of the way." You missed people replying to bots, thinking they're replying to a person: https://www.404media.co/facebooks-ai-spam-isnt-the-dead-inte....