The “dead internet” theory gets thrown around a lot these days especially by people critical of AI. The worry is that large language models and bots will flood the web with so much synthetic content that real human interaction will disappear - that everything will become artificial, empty, and repetitive.
But I’d argue we’re already well into that phase - and it didn’t take AI to get us here.
Originality is rare. Most content is recycled, reposted, reformatted like an endless stream of re-runs. Even the way people respond has become increibly predictable. You can write something mildly controversial or just unfamiliar, and you already know what you’re going to get: knee-jerk downvotes, the same tired comebacks, some vague accusation about your motives or identity - not a genuine engagement with the point. People don’t seem to read anymore so much as scan for whether you’re “one of them” or not.
And that’s the thing. Most users aren’t engaging with ideas - they’re running scripts. They’ve absorbed certain patterns from years online and now just execute them reflexively: a snarky quote from a meme here, a one-liner they saw get upvotes last week there. It’s social media call-and-response. And it’s killing the internet way more effectively than any AI could.
And yes, I already know how some people will respond to this - with some version of “I’ve never had those issues, maybe you’re the problem.” But never facing pushback isn’t a flex when you’ve been conditioned to avoid it. It’s like priding yourself on never failing when in reality you’ve never even taken a risk. Of course it feels like everything is fine if you’ve learned how to blend in. You’ve trained yourself not to touch the wire. That doesn’t disprove the problem. It is the problem.
That’s a nice way of putting it. I agree with the karma system. It can work behind the scenes as a content sorting algorithm, but seeing upvotes and downvotes does more harm than good imo.
You see this a lot on Reddit: no serious answers but mostly one-liners, reactionary phrases and people making jokes because they know it’s gonna be popular.
For that, karma be damned, I’m glad we’re on Lemmy because this effect isn’t that strong over here, at least for now.
I don’t feel like most people paid that much attention to total karma. The score of an individual post or comment is far more important - and that’s just as much of an issue here as it was on Reddit.
I’m just not sure how to improve it. Hiding the score entirely might make it feel like nobody even read what you said. Maybe instead of simple “like/dislike” voting, there should be other ways to react to a post - like “Well said,” “I disagree but appreciate the input,” “I laughed,” “Offtopic,” and so on.
With karma I was including vote and post scoring as well instead of just the net score on your profile, my bad.