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Posted by skwee357 1/18/2026

Dead Internet Theory(kudmitry.com)
697 points | 697 commentspage 5
DeathArrow 1/19/2026|
If you show signs of literacy, people will just assume you are a bot.
SubiculumCode 1/19/2026||
Maybe HN needs to have a real ID verification? One account per official government ID. I remember when social media companies like Facebook and others pushed really hard for it, and how I resisted, but now...well, maybe its a good thing to know that if I am talking to someone they are either a person, or the dedicated bot for that person, rather than to a host of propaganda selling swarms of bots trying to crack our brains for power and profit.
turnsout 1/19/2026||
I strongly believe that users will start to demand proof of humanity (and related things like content credentials on photos/videos), and eventually filter out anything that isn't verified. Through great expense and loss of privacy, we will eventually claw our way back to an internet that looks more or less the same as it was in 2020.

Unfortunately, less privileged users will have to endure the sea of AI content that still preys on the unauthenticated. It will be like using the web without an ad blocker, but 1000X worse.

big-and-small 1/19/2026|||
It's fairly easy to "farm" real ID NFC data since majority of documents are not intended to be actual digital signing key. And on top of that AI is getting pretty good at generating face / video details to the point where simple biometric data verification is also quite useless.
foobarian 1/19/2026||
I was thinking the time for the old PGP Web of Trust idea might have finally come [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

snickerer 1/19/2026||
The Internet got its death blow in the Eternal September 1994.

But it was a long death struggle, bleeding out drop by drop. Who remembers that people had to learn netiquette before getting into conversations? That is called civilisation.

The author of this post experienced the last remains oft that culture in the 00s.

I don't blame the horde of uneducated home users who came after the Eternal September. They were not stupid. We could have built a new culture together with them.

I blame the power of the profit. Big companies rolled in like bulldozers. Mindless machines, fueled by billions of dollars, rolling in the direction of the next ad revenue.

Relationships, civilization and culture are fragile. We must take good take of them. We should. but the bulldozers destroyed every structure they lived in in the Internet.

I don't want to whine. There is a learning: money and especially advertising is poison for social and cultural spaces. When we build the next space where culture can grow, let's make sure to keep the poison out by design.

l7l 1/19/2026||
How would one found a human verified internet without something like worldcoins orb? And even then you could not verify that the content is not created by ai.
ex3ndr 1/18/2026||
I am curious when we will land dead github theory? I am looking at growing of self hosted projects and it seems many of them are simply AI slop now or slowly moving there.
CommenterPerson 1/18/2026||
Good post, Thank you. May I say Dead, Toxic Internet? With social media adding the toxicity. The Enshittification theory by Cory Doctorow sums up the process of how this unfolds (look it up on Wikipedia).
fuddle 1/19/2026||
TikTok is full of AI generated user content, multiple startups can generate AI content promoting products for a fee e.g https://creatify.ai , https://www.arcads.ai
greenavocado 1/19/2026|
This is the original post which started it all in 2021: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
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