Editing Blog/2026-01-06/Is The Internet Dead? (section)

== Why Copy Comments? ==

Online communities have had a bot problem for a long time. The price of anonymity is [[wikipedia:Sybil attack|Sybil]] vulnerability. So the timeline goes like this:

# An anonymous community forms
# Once it is sufficiently popular, it is useful to influence it
# The natural thing to do is to create sockpuppets and use them
# The community attempts to solve this by requiring tenure (many subreddits require this)
# The natural thing to do is to create dormant sockpuppets
# The community adapts by inspecting accounts to see if they "look human": interact with a variety of posts, express opinions about unimportant things, and so on

At this point, one is faced with the strong challenge of generating human-looking comments. LLMs don't do this well: they have a stereotypical view of how online commenters speak which is stilted and very "hashtag selfie lol". But a pretty trivial approach is to pick a human account and simply replicate all their comments. So long as view saturation hasn't occurred, it is unlikely that human will see the reposts of his comments, and the mildest melding of a few accounts will reduce the chance that it looks exactly like another.