If you’ve spent any time on social media lately, you’ve probably noticed a shift: the open web feels less like a place where real humans hang out and more like a loud, fake carnival. It has essentially become one big clown show.
You’ve likely seen posts so completely absurd, wrong, or offensive that you felt compelled to drop into the comments just to call them out. Maybe it’s a picture of someone double-parking across two spaces, showing off their “outrage” that another driver left a note telling them they park like an idiot. Or maybe it’s a post declaring an opinion so bizarre that it makes no logical sense.
It feels like people have lost their minds. But the reality is much simpler: they do not care what you think, and they do not care if you agree. They only care that you responded.
Moving Past the Information and Knowledge Ages
First came the Information Age, where the goal was digitizing data and solving an access problem: making raw facts, manuals, and records available. Then came the Knowledge Age, where the focus shifted to human expertise, analyzing that data, and learning how to apply it to real-world problems.
Those eras are behind us. Today, raw facts and expert answers are universally accessible in seconds. Because information and knowledge are hyper-abundant, their economic value has dropped.
We now live in the Attention Economy. There are only so many hours in a day, and every algorithm on every platform is competing for your finite eyeball time. But truthful, balanced information is usually boring, and boring doesn’t hold human focus. Outrage, shock, and friction, on the other hand, hold attention like nothing else. Take this post for example, I wonder how many people will actually read to the bottom…it’s pretty boring.
Rage-Baiting: Why People Post Wild Things
Platforms don’t pay creators for being accurate or helpful (Remember this if nothing else). They pay them for engagement: likes, retweets, shares, and above all, comments. When someone posts something completely off-the-wall, they are executing a calculated strategy called “rage-baiting.”
- The Trap: A creator posts a photo or video doing something intentionally ridiculous or factually wrong.
- The Reaction: You get annoyed or shocked, stop scrolling, and spend 30 seconds typing a comment explaining why they are wrong.
- The Payoff: The algorithm doesn’t care if your comment says “Great job!” or “You are an idiot!” To the platform’s algorithm, a comment is a signal that this content is keeping people on the app.
The algorithm rewards that post by pushing it onto thousands of other feeds. More eyes mean more ad views, and more ad views mean a bigger payout for the creator. You thought you were putting someone in their place; in reality, your angry comment just helped fund their next post.
Beyond the Payout: Manufactured Consensus and Propaganda
It isn’t just independent creators chasing ad dollars, either. The exact same mechanics are used by political groups, corporations, and foreign interests to sway public opinion. In marketing and political science, this is called astroturfing: creating a completely fake grassroots consensus to make a radical or fringe idea look like a popular majority opinion.
When a network of fake accounts or coordinated posters floods a thread with the same narrative, it tricks human psychology. As social creatures, we naturally look to the room to see what everyone else thinks. If it looks like thousands of people agree on a position, your brain unconsciously assumes there must be truth to it.
Even worse, when comment sections become hyper-aggressive or overrun by fake outrage, everyday people stop participating. Moderate voices quiet down, leaving behind a manufactured illusion that everyone has taken an extreme side.
The Sock-Puppet Scam: Manufactured Consensus in the Forums
It used to be that community forums and message boards were the last bastions of genuine human advice. Today, even those spaces are heavily astroturfed.
One of the most insidiously common tactics on platforms like Reddit, tech forums, and niche message boards is the staged sock-puppet thread designed to bypass strict self-promotion rules. The pattern is almost algorithmic:
- The Hook: Account A posts a relatable, slightly desperate question about a common pain point (“Hey everyone, I’ve spent three weeks trying to solve X and nothing works, am I missing something?”).
- The Pitch: Account B, operated by the same marketer or run via an automated proxy tool, steps in a short time later with the link: “I had the exact same headache until I found [Specific Software/Product]. It completely fixed it for me.”
- The Closure: Account A logs back in to say “Wow, thank you so much, that solved it!” to bump the post in search engines and validate the recommendation for anyone reading later.
To the casual reader skimming search results or looking for authentic peer-to-peer recommendations, it looks like an organic breakthrough between two helpful strangers. In reality, it is a pre-scripted advertisement designed to exploit community trust and game search engine ranking algorithms, turning once-vibrant discussion hubs into digital billboards disguised as conversations.
Welcome to the “Dead Internet”
I’ve been telling people for years that the open web has become practically useless for real communication. It has devolved into an artificial, hollow place where the underlying infrastructure is really only good for moving private enterprise data and basic transport (like playing Guild Wars 2 heheh). What I didn’t realize until recently is that tech researchers actually have an official name for this phenomenon: the Dead Internet Theory.
The idea isn’t that the physical infrastructure of the web is down. Layers 1 through 7 of the network model work better than ever; fiber optics, routing protocols, and transport layers get packets where they need to go in milliseconds. The system hasn’t failed on a technical level. It is Layer 8, the human layer, that has completely broken down.
More than half of all internet traffic today isn’t generated by real people. It consists of automated bots, algorithmically managed accounts, and AI scrapers. And even when a post is created by a real person, the content usually isn’t genuine human expression anyway. It is engineered thirst-trap bait, whether that is a manufactured rage-bait post or someone posing in tight clothes purely to make you pause, scroll, and drop a comment to drive up their metrics.
- Bots generate the bait: AI scripts generate outrageous headlines, synthetic videos, and fake posts.
- Bots generate the response: Other bots comment on those posts to give them initial traction.
- Humans get hooked: Real people get dragged into the comment section to argue with what is essentially a ghost in the machine.
When you step onto the open web today, you aren’t walking into a vibrant town square of human thought. You are walking into an engineered feedback loop where machines generate drama to trick humans into staying logged in. Remember, a high “like” count is evidence of high popularity, not correctness. And it can be produced at scale.
The Bottom Line
The modern open web isn’t broken; it’s working exactly as designed. It is an attention machine optimized to extract time, clicks, and emotional energy from real people to keep ad revenues flowing and sway public perception.
The next time you see a post so ridiculously wrong or offensive that your fingers itch to type a furious reply, take a second to step back. You aren’t winning an argument, setting the record straight, or changing anyone’s mind, you are just falling for the illusion and filling out their time sheet.
Don’t feed the machines…
