Last September, a video of then Vice-President Kamala Harris trash-talking an assassination attempt on Donald Trump rocketed around old Twitter, racking up five figures in engagement before anyone with a brain said “fake.”
Eventually, Microsoft’s threat analysts traced the video’s origin to a Russian troll farm (Storm-1679, if you’re collecting Russian troll farm trading cards) and logged it as just another day on the timeline…
Reddit, which is not Old Twitter, holds the line on its own respective platform with two simple mechanics to prevent the spread of slop.
There is the Karma — The nectar. The juice. Reddit has one of most deeply entrenched cultures — and languages — on the internet (which has spawned any number of real-world offshoots). Every whiff of a marketing gesture, every suggestion that a fandom might be toxic, every 4th-level comment is downvoted to hell. This is the custom of the nerds.
Then, there are the mods — the unpaid janitors who clean up the edge cases. Most of the time. Sometimes they’re just power-hungry losers after all.
As it turns out, this structure was great in 2014, but it’s having a much tougher time in 2025. The media bubble tis no more and the distributed power during the Internet’s heyday we were promised has largely congealed in four places.
I looked, and there was a pale horse, and its rider's name was YouTube. And TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit. For its part, The Front Page of the Internet now averages just over 100M daily active users.
Or, better put: 100M idiots waiting to be exploited.
Every new warm body is a fresh attack surface.
The Dead Internet Theory, once a fringe conspiracy, now feels more like a whole mood that your crazy, conspiracy-loving uncle who talks like he’s in the Matrix actually kinda nailed. Nice work, Unky Morpheus.
Yes, it’s the idea that much of what we see online today — posts, comments, even engagement— is no longer human. The theory holds that most of the internet is now algorithmically generated sludge, low-effort SEO bait, or outright fake personae trying to steer public sentiment oneway or another.
What if that’s not crazy?
What if we really are the only real people left in the thread?
If you’ve engaged in more than four arguments on the internet with a rando, the odds are pretty good that one of those randos was a bot.
The point of the bot (or the troll, depending on their budget) was likely to get you angry about whatever it is you got angry about.
Kinda sucks, but yeah.
You got got by a bot.
Combine this with the Dark Forest Theory of the Web, a personal favorite because borrowed from Liu Cixin’s sci-fi novel, where every civilization hides to avoid being destroyed — and you start to see the form of modern techno-life. Bots shouting into the void. Bad actors cloaking their goals in dank memes.
And the humans?
They’re going private. Or going silent. Or gone. (But not like… dead… they’re just forced to be out in the real world.) (😨)
High-confidence prediction
The Dead Internet continues to pump more and more Turing-tested, hacker-approved sludge-bots into the public square.
Some of them shamelessly astroturf. Some seek to sow hatred and discord here among political parties. (We don’t do shit about it either, which is ya know, weird.) Some will spray chemtrails of carefully constructed narrative over the platforms, something that takes time to seep in. And what on Reddit can be done about it?
Well, in sorta unrelated bad news…
When mods tried the nuclear option (going private) during the 2023 API strike, Reddit had their cute little Snoo rewire the fuse box.
This means that as of Fall 2024, as a mod, you need corporate sign-off to flip a subreddit to private or NSFW.
Protest is allowed, provided of course it never puts a dent in their ad inventory. Reddit is a public company now, after all. Daddy Shareholder needs all those banana-for-scale jokes.
But I’m not just speculating
As recently as June, Google’s Threat Analysis Group noted that they’re whack-a-moling the menacingly named “DRAGONBRIDGE,” a China-linked influence network that’s pumped as many as 175k+ fake personas onto Reddit and YouTube.
While engagement is low, the volume is biblical.
Perhaps this is what explains the “vibe shift” some may have felt in r/geopolitics: earnest posts about panda diplomacy that read like they were directly machine-translated from a Ministry of Commerce press kit.
They even use the right hex-code for the red flag.
I mean, I’d imagine.
My guess: the first real domino to fall will be visual
Put the pieces together:
The protest valve is wrenched shut — Now, mods can’t lock the doors from the swarms of AI.
Spam is at industrial scale for multiple nations — This subterfuge isn’t limited to China. Obviously, the Trump admin knows this too — and in the right subreddits, you’ll similarly find new accounts replying to threads that reinforce division here, particularly from their liberal friends.
Audience shift to video – Text is continuing down the path toward its inevitable fate of being the EULA only a few still read. (Side-note: Why am I writing, then? Huh? HUH?! Well, I hate being on camera, so you see, I’m screwed).
It all starts with a video that feels true, probably about a U.S. political figure, autoplaying in r/all, and spreading faster than mods can make sense of it. By the time a fact-check rolls in, the lore will be canon.
That’s the insight. That until we have that moment — the Dark Forest Video Moment —Reddit may still feel safe-ish enough to post in. To ask. To answer. To take whatever bad advice you get from another human… hopefully one without some ulterior motive.
So what, man? Is this the end? 🥺
Ultimately, I think we're watching the collapse of something we didn't even realize we were taking for granted — the assumption that when we engage online, we're mostly talking to other humans. Reddit soon faces the AI hydra. In 4K.
It needs private communities now more than ever. But it would seem like their business model wasn’t quite built for that.
What gets me is how the economic incentives are completely backwards. Reddit needs engagement for ad revenue, so they're actively preventing the very mechanisms that might preserve real humans interacting with each other. They're choosing short-term profitability over the long-term viability of their platform. Sucks, bro.
If you can't tell if you're arguing with a person or an algorithm designed to make you angry, the safest response is just... silence.
And that would be a sad day, I think, for not just Reddit but the whole experiment that was the Internet in its former glory…
So TL;DR: AITA for wanting something better than this?
I’ve got like 250K karma riding on your answer.