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Basically the internet is made of primarily bot accounts interacting with each other and the majority of content online is not people interacting with people.
It’s a gross oversimplification of the theory, but I’m of the same mind. We’re getting really close to it.
So... Reddit
Is my Lemmy client busted or the parent comment is about Lee Harvey Oswald
I see dead internet theory
Might be your app (or it could be mine)
Yeah it looks good to me now. That was weird (bots are out to get me lol)
The true conspiracy is always in the comments, friend.
Small specialized cases of this have already been happening for nigh-on decades at this point (yes, the internet really is that old).
This article from 2014 describes the process of automated arbitrage in some detail, which was already happening back then:
http://www.dansdata.com/gz146.htm
In summary, some web retailer somewhere runs a bot to buy an item from someone else, mark it up, and resell it. When poorly managed, a bot run by one vendor winds up trying to pull stock from a bot from other vendor doing the same thing, and then that vendor tries to the pull-and-markup scheme on the first vendor. The net result is both bots getting into an infinite circular markup loop trying to buy the same item (which doesn't exist) from each other at an increasingly insane price. This only continues because no living person actually notices.