Dead Internet Theory - Hacker News

Posted by skwee357 1/18/2026

697 points | 697 commentspage 7

numeromancer 1/19/2026|

"photos of giants that built the pyramids in Egypt, all the way to short videos of pretty girls saying that the EU is bad for Poland."

Those sound funny; why would they make you sad?

embedding-shape 1/19/2026|

Because of the intention and purpose of those, not because of the actual pixels your brain interprets.

rickcarlino 1/18/2026||

Much like someone from Schaumburg Illinois can say they are from Chicago, Hacker News can call itself social media. You fly that flag. Don’t let anyone stop you.

E39M5S62 1/18/2026|

If you can ride the Metra from your city to Chicago proper, you're in Chicago!

incomingpain 1/19/2026||

I strongly believe in the dead internet theory.

There are many compounding factors but I experienced the live internet and what we have today is dead.

So I go on my province's subreddit. Politicswise, if there was an election today the incumbent politician would increase their majority and may even be looking at true majority. Hugely popular.

If you find a political thread, there will be 500 comments all agreeing with each other that the incumbent is evil, 50 comments downvoted and censored because they dare have an opinion that agrees with the incumbent, 100 comments deleted by anonymous mods banning people for what reason? Enjoy your echo chamber.

Anyone who experiences being censored a few times will just stop posting. Then when the election happens they have no idea at all why people would ever vote that way because they have never seen anyone do anything but agree with their opinion.

What an utterly dead subreddit.

anon_anon12 1/19/2026||

It was outrageous at start, especially in 2016, but surely after AI's boom, we are heading towards it. People have stopped becoming genuine.

foxes 1/19/2026||

Are em dashes in language models particularly close to a start token or something? Somehow letting the model continue to keep outputting.

semilin 1/19/2026|

I think it's mainly a matter of clarity as long embedded clauses without obvious visual delimiting can be hard to read and thus are discouraged in professional writing aiming for ease of reading from a wide audience. LLMs are trained on such a style.

BrtByte 1/19/2026||

What worries me most is not bots talking to bots, but humans adapting their voice to sound like bots because thatэs what works now

ForgotMyUUID 1/19/2026||

Well, if you are not satisfied by our company of AI karma-farmers, you are welcome to join "The Diamond Mine" BBS :)

crumpled 1/19/2026|

Maybe I just will...

gorgmah 1/19/2026||

Apps that require verification of "humanity" are going to get trendy. I'm thinking of world app for instance.

Gasp0de 1/19/2026||

Great, let's just require biometric identification before posting online, what could go wrong.

Ronsenshi 1/19/2026||

I guess the point of that would be to discourage average users from making AI slop? Can't imagine that this would stop bot farms from doing what they always done - hire people to perform these "humanity" checks once in a while when necessary.

grugagag 1/19/2026|

AI content including youtube videos, podcasta and such need a stamp that content was AI generated.

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