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

== How To Deal With Them ==

This is a hard thing, and where we are is less a destination and more one point on the path as the various participants adapt to each others' approaches. Tenure, history, and so on have been ineffective but some communities (/r/hardwareswap or /r/homelabsales) require buyer and seller confirm. One can Sybil in a few such, but because of the smaller numbers of people, these rings are easier to detect.

Reddit users attempt to crowdsource something at /r/TheseFuckingAccounts/ but ultimately, these bots aren't working counter to the platform's objectives and human obsession only takes things so far.

Machine-runnable methods like shadowbanning (hiding someone from everyone else) or heavenbanning (giving someone a lot of upvotes but hiding them from others) work temporarily but most bot rings will do the natural thing and use anonymous or innocent-seeming accounts to test visibility.

Metafilter has a one-time $5 fee as a gate that raises the price for a Sybil attack, and because there are no refunds on banning, it might make it cost-prohibitive.

In the end, all of these things happen because we're trying to scale trust. Maybe trust is not scalable.


{{#seo:|description=The blog post explores the Dead Internet theory and whether online content is being generated by bots to control the population, with a focus on examining}}

[[Category:Blog]]