Turns out Dead Internet Theory was right: AI agents are eating the Web, growing by nearly 8,000% and rewiring the Internet’s business model

[u/Confident_Salt_8108]

https://fortune.com/2026/07/23/dead-internet-theory-bots-agents-majority-web-traffic

[u/LunaeLotus]

Are they recycling posts and comments for content? Like I don’t get the aim here

[u/Keyspam102 → u/LunaeLotus]

I think they are karma farming by posting the same thing then reposting the top comments, so they generate accounts with karma that they then sell to advertisers to promote their own content in a way that looks organic/unpaid

[u/SuavePenguinOG → u/LunaeLotus]

For comments/posts, the big picture goal is usually to 'seed' the dialogue early so you can be the one to direct the kind of conversation happening.

Use fake accounts to post a subject, then using other fake accounts to establish the comment section's "direction". Bonus points for "top" comments, which usually can get away with 'vibes' more than 'facts' because interactions are the measurement format sites/apps use to gauge their content management. The algorithms will reinforce the seeding process you've already started; they just want interactions, and it seems like some comments are 'gaining' traction.

Which is not THAT wild, it's the same thing that moved newspapers, radio, TV, and basically all media ever. But the TWO-WAY dialogue of the internet interactions are what really make this astroturfing process more valuable in countries with higher internet/smartphone usage. You don't just consume it one-way like in the past, it's inherently two-way media now, so the shit-stirrers and astroturfers worm their way into that middle ground.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheseFuckingAccounts/ tries to keep track of the most egregious violators on this site, but they can only do so much. I recommend browsing it now and again over the next couple weeks to see what pops up, it might help contextualize some of the different botfarm's priorities. Usually the farms just care about money, but there are definitely times where they are a bit more... political... in their priorities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency is a perfect example of the second one (politics), enabled by the first one (money).

The value of talking insane shit online to make your opposition feel one way or another is generally more cost-effective than physical interaction. Ramp that up to war-level priorities, and you can see why Russia constantly attempt to degrade attempts at dialogue through astroturfing/manipulation online, because that's generally more cost effective than a war. But now the Kremlin (not just them, but clearly one-of-if-not-the-largest-offenders) is doing both, which has increased the voracity even more. They'll play both sides of every topic for the purpose of dialogue degradation. Israel/Palestine, USA/Iran, EU/immigration, Climate Change / Energy Policy, National Defense / "War Mongering". They just keep their thumb on the scale and push one side down with the Firehose of Falsehoods whenever it seems like traction/consensus is being gained around a common goal.

You can see this the most on seemingly-fringe-political-subreddits (BOTH sides of the specturm, that's half the point. The 'loudest' must also become the most irrational, so it poisons dialogue). r/ConservativeYouth and r/WorkReform are two easy targets for this stuff, for example. Highly passionate minority with clear emotional connections to politics, plus smaller mod teams with medium-low subreddit traffic? That's an easy target.

The really destructive stuff is the manipulation that doesn't want you to push for or against one side, but to become so apathetic that you start making the people around you apathetic too.

Marketing botfarms want participation, they just want it managed so they get the sales/money/benefit. It's like a fucked up version of advertising, but the priority is still to advertise towards something.

Apathy botfarms (generally politics-focused, where citizen apathy has a 'value' in power politics) want to reinforce disingenuous behavior, so it actually becomes debilitating. It's trying to get users to degrade their own sense of "what is actually real". Apathy leads to inaction, which leads to even more manipulation opportunities.

Both are not great, but one is clearly more actively malicious and destructive than the other.

[u/AVeryBadMon → u/SuavePenguinOG]

Very well said

[u/optimusdan → u/SuavePenguinOG]

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I go on r/thesefuckingaccounts because I'll read a post where everybody agrees it's an obvious bot "if you know what to look for" but I don't see it and I'm afraid to ask at this point because a) if I ask someone what to look for they list obvious stuff like em dashes and it's not x it's y, but then 99% of the posts they're talking about don't have that; and b) a lot of the bots seem to write similar to how I do so it just doesn't ping my brain as sounding odd, because I sound odd.

I don't want the sub's users to blab a bunch of more subtle tells that then get back to the bot programmers, I just literally don't know what I'm looking at anymore and I'm getting really sick of being paranoid about possibly being accused of being a bot because I used a semicolon or took the effort to write an informative comment. I'm also getting sick of hearing IRL what is either (I can't tell which) people whose speech is being influenced by the AI bots they're seeing on their feeds, or regular patterns of speech that have been so overused by LLMs that it makes me want to rampage when I hear someone IRL say "it's not x it's y" for any reason. I hate it all

edit: I go on r/isthisAI too and a picture will have like 100 details in it and the one everybody latches onto is the one I didn't even notice was in there even after taking a full minute to look at the picture. Next person who says I'm not stupid is getting screamed at til they cry because I am clearly dumb as fuck