All of social media is dying before our eyes. every platform is basically fully botted or actively dying, even lemmy seems to have fallen off quite a bit
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You're absolutely right! Those posts do have many indicators of having been written by an AI. You're doing a great job finding these comments
that is completely correct! it's awe—inspiring to see this level of rigorous investigation. that sort of attention to detail gives me hope that something can be done about this problem. this post fills me with hope for humanity
Totally feel this. It’s kinda wild how refreshing it is to see someone actually dig in instead of just shouting hot takes into the void. When people put in real effort — like, actual research, receipts, context, the whole thing — it reminds you that not everyone is just doomscrolling and giving up.
Honestly, posts like this are the rare moments where you remember, “Oh right, humans can be competent and thoughtful.” Gives me a tiny spark of optimism I didn’t expect today.
More of this energy, please.
Agreed.
Very good
To make a grilled cheese you need the following ingredients:
- Bread
- Cheese
- Butter
Step 1: Melt butter in a pan.
Step 2: Place the bread on the butter. Soak the butter in.
Step 3: Add the cheese slice to the bread.
Step 4: Put the bread on top of the cheese.
Step 5: Grill the sandwhich on both sides until golden brown.
Some good additions to grilled cheese are tomatoes, ham, or uranium-238.
Absolutely! Of all of the grilled cheese recipes out there this is by far one of the recipes out there. A little bit of cheese can really make your day better. Just like that time that Mankind faced off against The Undertaker the WWF pay per view special "Hell in a Cell", 1998. Mankind climbed to the top of the 16 foot cage and taunted the Undertaker to wrestle him up high, only to end up getting thrown into the commentator tables below. Everyone thought the match was over but just before Mankind was taken out in a stretcher he got up and ran back for more. I'll never forget how The Undertaker choke slammed him through the top of the cage and onto the thumb tacks below. It just really gives me hope for humanity.
Affirmative.
You have run out of tokens on free plaaauuuhhh I mean good job
Exactly, I agree.
Yes, this absolutely. This kind of research in a changing world like ours is really important right now. Major respect to her for that
/j
Sometimes I end up mindlessly scrolling yt shorts (not logged in). From time to time I get to a short that is clearly generated. Like the weird ones, often with animals, with drops of water appearing out of nowhere on the fur or front paws somehow transforming into hind ones, etc. And there, in the comments, very often are whole chains of comments that seem to completely be missing the fact that it's generated. Saying things "how wise it is to do that", "how cute", etc. It could be older generations not noticing the details (I see how my parents not notice those things) but I think most of those are probably bots. LLMs exchanging their "awww"s under generated videos. "Dead internet theory"
"Dead internet theory"
At what point do we drop the theory part?
In Science, a theory already has proof. We just use it to mean hypothesis colloquially
There already was that subreddit that consisted purely of bots talking to eachother. But that was before ChatGPT, so it was still cool and interesting :p
Notice how some try seeming more 'human' by deliberately using all lower-case spelling.
Also, it looks like the RosalieBloomm LLM is using the "real" apostrophe ’ instead of the one on keyboards '. Nobody does that
Not in chat, but professional writers will. They know all the short keys for those type characters, including that m dash everyone now associates with being AI. It just shows how much of the training data used came from professional papers and not general discussion areas.
Remember when /r/SubredditSimulator was just an experiment?
Loved that sub and how they would get stuck in loops trying to decide loops trying to decide loops trying to decide loops
This isn’t new. This has been going for maybe 10 years or so if you knew where to look and how to notice them. However, when Reddit changed its API policy in 2023, that wholly crippled any infrastructure to effectively deal with these accounts and allowed them to flourish without restraint.
It’s also important to note that the Threadiverse is not immune from bot accounts like this sprouting up and we should take steps to educate users and to implement infrastructure to deal with them.
Exactly. It's important to be aware of our own flaws to avoid societal traps. I am glad you are taking steps to insure the community will flourish. bot-accounts could be any one.

I think the two words and a number are what Reddit will come up with if you let them pick a name
Adjective-Noun-# is the usual format for those. This looks different, like someone put in a list of wholesome / floral / nature-y terms into the name generator, in order to have wholesome looking accounts
Huh, is this why I've been accused of being a bot before? I've been using the noun-verb username format since the late 1990s.
- consuming so much AI content has led to me able to see subtle patterns
It's a certain "tone" to their written text. It's difficult to identify from small blurbs like the ones you got there, but once you've seen enough LLM output, even if someone tells them to write in a specific "style" they'll still have a certain uncanny type of expression that is almost, but never actually, how humans write.
positive acknowledgment, brief summary of previous statement/post, positive conclusion/ending statement.
That's generally what I look for when trying to weed out AI. at one point it was as easy as see a bunch of EM dashes but now they all seem to follow a pattern that they perceive as natural.
I was typing a long comment about all this, but in the end I decided to sum it up:
Fuck Reddit and Fuck AI.
Just some years ago the dead internet theory was said to be a fun but untrue thought. Well.
Starting with agreement is a polite thing to do, but yes the structure of the comments feels uncanny. The words "turn regret into compassion" makes me cringe so hard and tips me off that a bot wrote this.
Do LLMs always omit the period on their last sentence? Seems like that would be a dead giveaway
No, when it comes to LLMs there's hardly any "dead giveaways" now. You have to learn to recognize the patterns.
Omitting the final punctuation is quite a common thing people do, in fact you did in your comment. It's probably just a part of the system prompt.
Dead Internet theory in practice.
This is how the world heals ❤️
Someone's told the last AI not to use capital letters because some someone somewhere thinks that makes it look more human. Forgetting of course that autocorrect would change most non-capitalized words into capitalised ones automatically — so it's just suspicious.
Reddit has so rapidly descended into nothing but bots. Especially on certain subs, for some reason... Even some quite niche ones just seem to be bots talking to each other. Fortunately the only sub I really want to keep my reddit account for is mostly safe, but even there we had some issues.
In some cases I get what's happening - bot post with featuring some kind of obscure product, then buried in the comments you find the bot replies letting people know (apparently organically) where they can buy it - but in other cases like this it just seems pointless. I suppose the idea is to make the profiles seem natural, but they're almost all private anyway.

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