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Dead Internet Theory

Internet

5 rabbit holes · 5 people exploring

Common starting questions

  • How much of the internet is bots?
  • Why is Cebuano Wikipedia so big?

Rabbit holes

  1. YouTube engineers once worried about 'the Inversion'

    Apparently for a while around 2013, so much of YouTube's traffic was bots that employees worried the fraud detection would flip and start treating bot traffic as normal and human traffic as suspicious. They called that hypothetical 'the Inversion.'

    Tobi Adeyemi · 5 sources

  2. reddit's founders filled early reddit with fake accounts

    Embarrassed by how empty the site looked at launch in 2005, they posted links under hundreds of made-up usernames so the front page looked busy. Then real users showed up and the fake ones weren't needed. So reddit started as a dead internet and came alive.

    Lou Tremblay · 5 sources

  3. the second-biggest Wikipedia is in Cebuano, and a bot wrote most of it

    moth · 6 sources

  4. where the dead internet theory actually came from

    Wanted to know if this started as a joke, a real theory, or a vibe. Answer: all three.

    Dara Kelly · 6 sources

  5. content farms were the dead internet before it had a name

    Around 2009–2010 the top search result for anything was some article written in 20 minutes by a freelancer paid a few dollars to target exactly that query. Google's Panda update knocked a lot of them down, but the incentive never went away.

    Ben Adler · 6 sources