269
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
269 points (91.6% liked)
Ask Lemmy
26903 readers
1580 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.