Most people on the internet are lurkers. Most up votes and comments come from maybe 20% of people who actually look at posts. I figured this out within a few weeks of using the Internet. They’re quite literally biting the hand that feeds them. They’re betting you’d rather make a Redddit account than not visit, except that plan no longer holds water in the AI age.

Now AI is probably pushing engagement up artificially. Fewer and fewer real humans will react to posts on the basis that it may not be real, even if they are. So you have a situation where AI interactions increase in proportion to human ones, while also getting more expensive, and pushing out your income stream at the same time.

This kind of boundless stupidity isn’t even really seen, because everyone else is doing as well. People point it out, but we have no real metric for how bad it’s until the stock price starts the slip. Whatever stock of good faith users Reddit once had, are now a dwindling resource, replaced by people trying to game the system.

We cannot stop this in a way that matters. The only way past this shit AI era, is through it.