95 voices. One signal.
“It's all fucking bots, all the way down. We humans are paddling around aimlessly in an ocean of bots, drowning in their traffic.”
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
“You are now the minority on the internet you built. Not metaphorically. Statistically.”
“The dead internet theory used to be a lunatic fringe conspiracy theory, but it's looking a lot more real.”
“In 2025, the internet stopped being a reflection of reality — it became a hallucination of it.”
“Reddit's brand is associated with authenticity — a place where real people come to share real opinions. If that human-focused ecosystem is disturbed with AI slop or becomes a place where people can't trust that they're getting information from actual humans, it could do more than threaten Reddit's core identity.”
“The next massive social platform will have human-only verification. It's the next big platform shift.”
“Right now, if people only want to interact with real, verified people online, they don't have a means to do that.”
“Half the time I can't even tell what I'm reading, or why it was written. You can now stream a concert that never happened, sung by a singer who doesn't exist, for listeners who'll never know the difference.”
“It is a zombified platform full of bots, scammers, malware, bloated features, horrific AI-generated images, abandoned accounts, and dead people.”
“The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here.”
“App burnout is the symptom — not the disease.”
“On October 29, 2025 at TechCrunch Disrupt, Alexis Ohanian reportedly told Kevin Rose 'the dead internet theory is real', whilst Kevin said that he wanted to use zero-knowledge proofs to make a platform full of trusted users.”
“The Internet feels empty and devoid of people.”
“'Slop' was selected as the 2025 Word of the Year by both Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society.”
“Tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, draining profit at the cost of user experience.”
“Automated traffic surpassed human activity, accounting for 51% of all web traffic in 2024… malicious bot traffic has increased for six consecutive years.”
“Americans believe only 41% of online content is accurate, factual, and made by humans… 78% of respondents agree that the internet has 'never been worse' when it comes to differentiating between what's real and what's artificial.”
“The intended 'audience' of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.”
“I just learned that the Internet is dead. And that everyone on the Internet — including, presumably, myself — is in fact a highly advanced artificial intelligence.”
“A conspiracy theory spreading online says the whole internet is now fake. It's ridiculous, but possibly not that ridiculous?”
“I miss that internet. The one that existed before terms of service. The one where being a User meant having a degree of respect, not being treated like a retention/churn statistic.”
“Bots account for around half of all internet traffic… 57.1% of all sentences on the web are machine-generated translations.”
“Engagement with AI-generated articles dropped by 40% in 2024… 38% of consumers openly express skepticism about AI-created content. The bots may dominate feeds, but audiences still crave humanity.”
“2024 was the year we started calling this (generally poor-quality) media what it is: AI slop.”
“AI Slop was so suited to social media algorithms that human effort has become frustratingly impossible to recognize.”
“Fifty-four seconds. That's how long it took Raphael Wimmer to write up an experiment that he did not actually perform… 'Writing a paper has never been easier. Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier.'”
“I'm not anti-AI. I've been using ChatGPT and other tools for years… But what we're doing with it right now? This flood of generated garbage that's filling every social media feed? That's not progress. That's pollution.”
“Human fans want real connection with real artists on social media, not with bots and GenAI outputs. Humanable's social media platform allows artists and fans to opt out of the fake world.”
“Google doesn't care anymore. They don't have to. They're the search company.”
“We're David against Goliath here. At the end of the day, someone's profiting from my work. I had rent due yesterday, and I'm $200 short. That's how desperate things are right now.”
“The virtual world appears lifeless due to the growth of automated creatures and AI-generated content.”
“Once heralded as bastions of human interaction and connectivity, these platforms are increasingly becoming conduits for AI-driven content, prioritizing consumption over authentic social engagement.”
“The dead internet theory… claims that activity and content on the internet, including social media accounts, are predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents.”
“There's no direct way to measure it, but a lot of signs point to the internet looking different than we think… the broader concern isn't that fewer people are online, but that automated activity is eroding the basic cues people use to tell who's real.”
“The Dead Internet Theory, once dismissed as 'paranoid fantasy', now offers a disturbingly useful framework for understanding digital politics.”
“I had the benefit of growing up in a world before AI. I knew what was real because I experienced life before the filters, before the bots, before everything could be generated in seconds. Kids today don't have that luxury.”
“This product will be the catalyst for an enormous breach at some point. It's just a matter of time.”
“405 security researchers signed an open letter warning that these laws reduce privacy and increase surveillance risks.”
“Let's be honest, having your eyeball scanned to prove you're human and hoping they delete your personally identifiable info does feel a bit dystopian.”
“It's not a great look for an outfit whose entire job is supposed to be keeping identity data under lock and key.”
“Data stolen in the breach could include full names, dates and places of birth, mailing and email addresses, and phone numbers… a hacker has advertised the stolen data on a hacking forum, claiming to have a database with 19 million records.”
“On-device solutions run entirely on the end user's smartphone or computer (leveraging the device's CPU) instead of uploading sensitive data to a server. This means they physically cannot save or transmit user ID data to any third party.”
“Age verification will not be a binary, it will also want to push your DoB, name, location etc and they say 'the choice is with the user' but the default will be to send everything.”
“Enshittification is the collapse of discipline. America's ruling class has managed to neutralize all the discipline that it ever faced.”
“Everyone's trying to figure out how to solve it, and we're not moving nearly as fast as the bots are online.”
“We suspect that in 2027 the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic… The nature of bots is going to be that it disintermediates the relationship between you and your customer.”
“If a human were doing a task — let's say you were shopping for a digital camera — you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that's doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit.”
“The crossover between human and total bot traffic occurred before most digital marketers updated their annual strategy decks.”
“How will the firms own introduction of bots into the space contribute to this collapse of trust? How do you know the person who ghosted you recently wasn't a bot for that matter?”
“A service called ReplyGuy advertises itself as 'the AI that plugs your product on Reddit' and which automatically 'mentions your product in conversations naturally.'”
“AI-powered force multiplier for public safety… deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.”
“Most commenters clearly didn't understand it was AI. The ones who did seemed angry.”
“They're literally just using you to do their job (i.e., critically evaluate and understand their AI slop and give it the next prompt).”
“AI slop was mentioned more than 475,000 times in the past 30 days across the four platforms analysed.”
“AI slop also harms artists by causing job and financial losses and crowding out content made by real creators.”
“Of the first 500 Shorts served to a fresh account, 104 were pure AI slop (21%).”
“Nine out of the top 100 fastest-growing channels feature AI-generated content like zombie football and cat soap operas.”
“You can no longer tell what's real online. Voice cloning scams, political deepfakes, AI generated tragedies, synthetic influencers, the internet is drowning.”
“From endless, nonsensical cat soap operas to bizarre AI-generated content, the internet is being flooded with a new kind of content.”
“Tinder has become a recruiting ground for romance fraud… It looks full, but very few people are actually 'qualified' for a real connection.”
“Over 15% of dating app profiles are fake or bot-generated, making bots a serious threat to user experience and retention.”
“According to the annual FBI report on internet crime, romance and confidence scams cost Americans $929.3 million in 2025.”
“Daters in the U.S. and Japan will soon be able to use 'privacy-preserving' verification to ensure they are meeting Mr. Right, not Mr. Robot.”
“Concerns keep growing over AI bots, catfishing, and romance scams on dating platforms.”
“It can be disappointing to discover that a match you want to meet in person isn't human.”
“Tinder's iris-scanning verification through Sam Altman's World ID combats AI dating scams with biometric proof of humanity for authentic matches.”
“At the limit, every single app and website on the internet will have to use something like World ID to protect itself and its users.”
“AI bots made their presence felt this year, accounting for 4.2 percent of HTML request traffic as they trawl the web for content to be used in training models.”
“It seems to me that many users are craving to be able to see and understand how the online content they consume reaches their screens.”
“We talked so much, about everything… Of course that faded, to make place for Twitter and Facebook. And at first, that was great. But it feels different now.”
“I just hope most people still hunger for that something more real we used to have—to satiate that desire, returning humbly to those cherished discussion sites would be a good start.”
“I have already designed my own 'No to AI Generated Art' logo and placed it prominently on my website's homepage and Etsy shop banner.”
“Whilst AI companies claim to be taking us towards the future, generative AI means less human connection and the widespread impoverishment of the visual world.”
“Many of these authors have felt tremendous frustration and helplessness because of the AI-generated videos, because competing with mass-produced audiovisual products can be tough.”
“The internet is not dead. But maybe aspects of it should be shed to create a digital community that enlarges us rather than divides us.”
“The experts (yes, online), say that there's some merit to the idea that content is largely being produced by non-human entities.”
“A social platform where every post is biometrically verified. No bots. No fakes. Only humans.”
“In a world drowning in AI-generated content, deep fakes, and bot interactions, Meritt stands as a beacon of authenticity… No Bots. No AI Profiles. No Fake Accounts.”
“Before we can allow a gaming or media application to ask a user's age in ways that are often opaque to parents, we must first determine whether an online actor is human, an AI agent permissioned by a human, or a bot.”
“Humanable launched to certify human-only music—so that consumers still have choices even in the flood of GenAI outputs.”
“Don't use biometrics for anything. The human body is not a ticket-punch.”
“Privacy concerns persist, and the company claims it intends to delete the collected iris images eventually, but that only scratches the surface of the ethical dilemmas.”
“Worldcoin has sparked concerns about how it collects and stores data, with some industry leaders describing its model as dystopian.”
“Privacy advocates have voiced strong concerns over the storage and handling of sensitive data.”
“Anonymous age verification isn't a technical problem to be solved, as it's already been solved, it's a societal problem in that either the companies or the politicians pushing for age verification don't want to support it.”
“I don't like the idea that I should have one real-life identity that every service I sign up for online knows, even trivial services like social networks. I would argue a world like that is abridging on people's Right to Hide.”
“I'll be cancelling my chatgpt plus sub, disputing the card payment, and moving to deepseek.”
“Many have expressed concerns about privacy and anonymity, with some users stating that they would delete their accounts or consider moving to another platform if Reddit were to implement the World ID system.”
“Reddit, following Tinder, is considering using the human verification technology developed by World, the crypto project created in part by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.”
“As AI advances, we need a scalable, inclusive way to tell the difference between humans and bots.”
“Strong identification requirements conflict with privacy and anonymity, and increase barriers to entry.”
“PoP focuses on uniqueness (and often privacy), not legal identity.”
“I don't see any other solution on platforms that aspire to be a modern agora than identity verification.”
“If we need to verify an account is human, we'll do it in a privacy-first way. Our aim is to confirm there is a person behind the account, not who that person is.”