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this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Something nobody talks about is how the internet transformed into a whole other beast around 2015 to 2016. Nobody talks about it because all the bots (used loosely to mean bad actors of human or otherwise) control discourse. It's masses of undefineable swarms of bot posting at any give moment in any given part of the internet.
People talk about that constantly?
If you ask someone if the Internet is full of bots they will tell you yes. However 5 minutes later they will be on social media and forget about it.
It's impossible to think critically all the time.
Uhh what? Who people?
The bot accusation is a rhetorical cudgel in itself. What I mean is the bot swarms aren't configured to speak of the before times.
Another thing is that it's as if easily half the population of actual human posters have no knowledge of the time before. Could this be true on a technical basis. I know internet adoption grew fast more recently in some parts of the world. But how does the data line up? I haven't looked.
So the real human components of the bot swarms so to speak are living a sort of allegory of the cave. They have no knowledge of the world wide web as a whole. They only know the slice of internet they started using in the bot swarm era. For them it seems to be nothing but a battle grounds of social, political, commercial warfare. Basically this is the big tech media platforms.
It doesn't seem to compute for people much more than a shallow saying, "it's all bots". Yeah of course every says that all the time. But how is it all bots? How much if any do they know of outside the few apps on their phone. People don't seem to have much knowledge of the before times very much. Or the internet outside of social media at all.
People hardly ever make old references. Nobody understands old colloquialisms. That seems like it could be a litmus test for someone who is a real human being.
I feel like it's can roughly comprehend the vibe of what you're saying, but im losing you on the specifics.
I feel like you're trying to apply a model of both young people and bots such that they don't understand a time before the large scale proliferation of bots?