Dead Internet Theory is now Fact and no one is ready for this conversation. I was gobsmacked when some founders bragged to me they'd 'bought a subreddit' - I didn't think that was possible - but they'd simply bought the moderators' accounts and taken control (to get the GEO).

I'm searching for the next wave of social, because it's going to need to be verifiably human (in a non-creepy way) and not-compromised - and it'll do VERY well because all these LLMs need authentic, human content. Expect it to come from surprising places...

e.g., Nike Run Club has 99.9% verifiably human accounts (bc you have to run with your phone) and all they'd have to do is spin up a forum and hire some great community leads to create a great + engaged running community.

Like many in 2004, I ran a phpbb forum and creating Reddit was a great way to consolidate all those disparate forums (I'm thinking the pendulum will swing back now to decentralization as people seek probably human content).

And who knows... don't count @digg out yet...

content recommendation needs a human in the loop. We're building the curation layer for music. Full onchain ratings, open markets, zero vanity metrics

The irony of you coming onto X and proclaiming that the dead internet theory is fact! Ever since the web began, there has always been people who want to game the system. Keyword stuffing. Buying backlinks. Buying reviews. Cloaking. Hidden content. Loophole will get closed soon.

buying mods to capture a subreddit is the cheapest GEO arbitrage going right now

How does reddit combat this? If it doesn’t, its value erodes significantly, and goes from being the most valuable organic corner of the internet to GEO seeding slop :/

People are buying warmed up TikTok And YouTube accounts. Whereever there is opportunity there is always someone willing to game the system.

@grok explain the dead Internet theory, and also explain GEO and its relationship to the original post

Genuine passionate community engagement ftw

AI content has ruined FB and IG. Human centric social media is begging to be made. Who is going to do it? It can't be AI fanboys. It has to be someone who is fundamentally anti AI and pro human.

Reddit will be unusable in 6 months or less. Agency after agency have spun up to spam Reddit to promote products. Second order effects in action: Google effectively killed search by no longer exposing any non-massive brand, Google partners with Reddit for data sharing to train the LLMs, marketers can no longer rank their clients in Google, to they flock to Reddit to influence the LLMs.

The real challenge isn't AI replacing people. It's learning how to distinguish signal from synthetic noise.

Anothr TEs bigMorons. He is a mix of Jean-Marc, Émile, my brother and another guy.. Rêmi Girard!!

How do we fix this?

X is the worst of all. Literally talking to bots 9/10 times.

It’s now “evolved” into the Dead Media Theory. In the Dead Internet Theory, bots replace people. In the Dead Media Theory, narratives replace reality.

SPEAK ON IT!!!!!!!!!

Nothing is real. Everything is permitted.

You might like an article I recently posted about the snowballing effects on the town squares and utility internet we once knew:

i have a B2B subreddit w/ 50k members that I started before reddit went to shit. Anyone interested in buying my account, hmu lol