I’ve been on Reddit for 13 years, from the site’s heyday as ‘the front page of the internet’ up until now. I remember viral AMAs (Woody Harrelson’s infamous, disastrous promotional AMA for the movie Rampart spawned a million community inside jokes), and subreddits going dark in protest for rules changes. Another user once gave me Reddit Gold via the old reward system for a helpful post about beginner comic book recommendations. I was in the threads for what might have been the funniest (safe for work) thing I’ve ever read on the internet, when a guy hated the steak his wife’s boss cooked for him, and tried to throw it out the window.
As a 34-year-old man, Reddit has been a part of my adult life for almost as long as I’ve been an adult. Just a few weeks ago, I asked the r/DIY community for help on an issue and got a load of very helpful, if occasionally contradictory, responses from kind strangers.
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This all culminated, for me, in the above video on r/interesting cross-posted from TikTok on 8 April. The video is titled ‘A social media bot farm‘ and shows phones without screens hooked up to wire racks, used because most account verifications require SIM cards. Research from Cambridge University found a “thriving underground market through which inauthentic content, artificial popularity, and political influence campaigns are readily and openly for sale… All this activity requires fake accounts, and each one starts with a phone number and the SIM hardware to support it.”
I counted about 18-20 phones to a rack, and the racks look like they’re ranked four deep. Five of those ranks are stacked on top of each other in tower formations like data centers — I make that about 400 phones.
The camera then pans around the room to show the viewer tens of these towers, maybe over a hundred, all equipped in the same fashion. Perhaps 400,000 phones, all with at least one account and probably more when you factor in different sites, all humming and blinking and whirring to themselves, turning water and power into rage and engagement.
While I knew this was what was happening from an intellectual standpoint, seeing it laid out in such a bleak, sterile fashion made my stomach turn. I felt sad and revolted and kind of empty, like switching off a documentary about the horrors of war only to stare at yourself in your TV’s reflection. The post has 31,000 upvotes, with the top comment — getting 8,100 upvotes alone — was just a simple sentence: “This is who I’m arguing with on here”.
The Dead Internet Theory
While I’ve gotten an incredible amount of use and enjoyment out of Reddit over the years, the changes to the site — becoming more algorithm-orientated, scraped for AI, targeted by bots and the increase in ads, which is likely a targeted move to make the user experience worse, to get power users like me to sign up to Reddit Premium — meant the decision to leave the site behind was getting easier. But I was still getting my daily news from the site, still reading the comments obsessively and getting riled up, still using it as a place to engage with my hobbies and current events alike.
The bot farm video changed everything, putting every interaction, positive and negative, into stark perspective. It was such a visceral wake-up call, in the same way a video of factory farming might turn someone vegetarian. Intellectually, you know this is happening, but it’s only when you’re confronted with the disturbing images of the reality of it that you really get your head around the facts.
There’s a hypothesis called ‘the Dead Internet Theory’ that’s gained a lot of popularity over the last five years. It’s one that purports there is more bot activity online than there is human activity, leading to the idea that the internet is no longer beneficial for human connection. It’s just bots farming engagement in endless loops.
I thought about this a lot after seeing the video. If I got rid of Reddit, I had nothing to replace it with: every popular online source of discussion was becoming a similar engine of manipulation and engagement-farming.
However, perhaps that was for the best. As TechRadar’s resident health nut, I cover fitness and wellness technology, and that extends to our relationship with our online lives, too. Studies have found that increased time online in both adolescents and adults correlates with increased anxiety, depression, and ‘meta-stress’: ruminating on why they feel this way, essentially a recursive stress about their own stress. Maybe time away from all such message boards was exactly what I needed.
I hovered over the settings tab for about ten minutes before finally pulling the trigger, at which point I felt a huge rush of adrenaline hit me. I then deleted the app on my phone, in case I’m tempted to buckle and create a new account.
Healthy boundaries
This isn’t an article designed to tell you all to delete your Reddit accounts, too, or an op-ed trashing Reddit’s management. If this post has a message at all, it’s to encourage you to interrogate the content you read online, especially the content posted by anonymous social media users.
Why might this comment have been written? Why do I feel strongly about this? Am I being emotionally manipulated into viewing the world a certain way, or voting a certain way, or engaging with a website? After beginning to seriously doubt the validity of most user comments, I found the formerly-addictive Reddit comment sections far easier to leave.
How else to take control of your online life? A few months ago, I also began following technology writer Chris Hall’s advice and turning my Android phone to greyscale for long periods of time for a less stimulating user experience. Our managing editor, Josephine Watson, also managed to halve her screen time with these three iOS features.
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matt.evans@futurenet.com (Matt Evans)
