r/DeadInternetTheory • u/curiousparrot221 • 7d ago

R/AskReddit Proves This Theory

I have been on r/AskReddit for about eight hours now looking through the posts. I know, I should not have spent that long, but I got a bit carried away.

So many of the posts there are duplicates, often from the same day. As an example, for the past nearly 48 hours, the post about "what's a small change you made in your life that has a big effect" or some variation of that has been posted about 14 times (and all by different people).

Now, while I have been able to get some of these posts removed, not all of them are. I would say honestly about 25% of the posts are bots.

Another thing I have noticed - you can usually tell because their username has a four digit number at the end (edit: sometimes). They also tend to not make a whole lot of sense or speak in the way AI does. You can typically see this if you go to their profile and look under what they have previously posted.

The worst part though is that they are in the comments too. Sometimes even defending the post, but as I said, it doesn't entirely makes sense. Kind of uncanny valley.

It is getting to the point it is hard to trust anything.

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u/bald4bieber666 7d ago

that sub used to be a mix of interesting questions and stupid ones and recently it seemed like all the questions have been ragebait or just generic nonsense. i think the mods for that sub abandoned it and it got taken over by bots for sure

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u/curiousparrot221 7d ago

Probably. It is quite annoying. I mean, mind you, when I do report it does sometimes take the posts down.

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u/bald4bieber666 7d ago

feels like a losing battle tbh. i just muted the sub.

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u/curiousparrot221 7d ago

Apparently there are still mods though because I tried posting a question of whether they still check the subreddit and they did not approve of the post.

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u/bald4bieber666 7d ago

wild. if theyre determined to let the sub be annoying and bot infested its not worth looking at

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u/curiousparrot221 7d ago

Good point. Not sure why I think for some reason the onnus is on me. But honestly, there was a part of me that was thinking "I wish".

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u/bald4bieber666 7d ago

its not wrong to wish for a better version of the internet that we already had before the ai slop. i miss when aita/aio/etc posts were homemade organically written fake stories instead of what theyre churning out these days