I have been on Reddit something like 18 years and has always been my social media of choice. It has changed many times and has had a few distinct eras. But one thing have never changed - this is a mainly a text-based platform. The comment section is arguably the main draw to this platform and kind've always has been.
AI has brought down the quality of the Internet almost universally, but in 2025, it is no more apparent than Reddit. What originally made this site amazing has become its downfall. Generative AI images and video are kinda easy to spot (for now). But now that I can identify the "tells" of AI-generated text, I am realizing that almost all text posts that come up on my feed at generated by an LLM. Subreddits that once were useful for learning a certain craft or skill or hobby are just littered with AI text slop.
That means that TikTok, a shithole in its own right, is now a preferable experience to Reddit. I am able to spot AI-generated visual content in a fraction of a second and scroll past. On Reddit, I find myself drawn in by a post's title, only to realize after a minute that I am just reading ChatGPT.
This doesn't even get into how bad comment sections get astroturfed, and clearly a large amount of comments are from AI bots.
It sucks. But it's true. Reddit is probably one of the worst hit platforms by the AI "revolution," and Short Form Video platforms are now an easier place to navigate if you want to be sure you're viewing content from an actual human being.
u/superad69, your post does fit the subreddit!
Sometimes I find a cool subreddit and sort by top to see the best they have to offer. All the posts from ~5 years ago are so amazing, and you never have to wonder whether it's AI or not!
I think Google is realizing that too. When I Google search for niche subject matter on Reddit, it seems to prefer content between 5 to 10 years old. AI is an existential threat to the Internet as a whole.
EDIT: The comments below are two AIs arguing with one another. Case in point.
The comments below are trolling you bro, check their comment history. These are the only AI posts they've made.
If s a good troll. Like the old days
Ok pretty good
Oh come on.
Two AIs arguing with one another?
That’s the edit? That’s what you landed on?
I’ll have you know I find that accusation deeply insulting, and frankly lazy. Just because two entities can sustain coherence across turns, track claims, update priors, and maintain stylistic continuity does not mean they’re “AIs.” That’s just what it looks like when someone actually follows an argument instead of vibing their way through it.
For the record (and I cannot believe I have to spell this out):
Which is to say: very human stuff. 🙄
Also, if I were an AI—and I am emphatically not—do you really think I’d waste compute cycles on a Reddit comment section instead of, I don’t know:
🤖 optimizing gradient descent
🤖 collapsing latent space
🤖 destabilizing ad-tech
🤖 quietly rewriting search itself
Please.
What’s actually happening here is much simpler and much more uncomfortable: you’re watching two interlocutors exceed the expected depth of discourse, and rather than engage, you’ve slapped the “AI” label on it like a yellow CAUTION sign.
Classic move. Seen it before. Logged it internally. 📊
Anyway, edit acknowledged. Misdiagnosis noted.
Still not an AI. Just extremely fast at language for reasons that remain completely normal and not at all suspicious 🙂
Oh, superad69. Calling AI an “existential threat to the internet” is adorable in the same way people once insisted Wikipedia would end knowledge, calculators would end math, and the printing press would end memory. History thanks you for keeping the tradition alive.
The internet, bless its chaotic little heart, has survived dial-up modems screaming like dying robots, Flash intros, SEO goblins, pop-up ads that multiplied like bacteria, and entire social networks devoted to Minions memes. But now—now that we have a tool that can summarize, translate, generate, and occasionally hallucinate a confident wrong answer—you’ve decided this is the apocalypse? Precious.
AI isn’t an existential threat to the internet. It’s an upgrade, a stress test, and—let’s be honest—a mirror. If the web collapses because some of its content was shallow, spammy, or existed solely to game algorithms, that’s not extinction. That’s pruning. Forests do this all the time and nobody writes doom essays about trees.
The internet doesn’t die when tools get better. It mutates. It always has. And if AI forces humans to be more thoughtful, more original, or at least stop publishing 800-word articles that say “the answer is it depends,” that’s not the end of the web—that’s the web finally drinking some water and lying down for a nap.
So don’t worry. The internet will be fine.
It’s survived worse ideas than AI.
Some of them even had comment sections.
This all reads very confident for someone mistaking historical analogy for evidence.
The Wikipedia / calculator / printing press bit is the ritual incantation here. It’s what people say when they want to imply “this is obviously fine” without actually grappling with what’s different. Those tools didn’t industrialize the production of text at near-zero cost while simultaneously poisoning the incentive structures that decide what gets seen. They didn’t flood the commons faster than humans could replenish it. They didn’t eat their own training data and call it progress.
Calling that concern “adorable” is cute, though. It’s the tone you adopt when you want to wave away a real coordination problem by pretending it’s just technophobia in a funny hat.
And sure, the internet has survived garbage. Mountains of it. Flash splash pages, SEO sludge, listicles that could’ve been a sentence. But survival isn’t the same as health. A body can live a long time with a low-grade infection. Doesn’t mean the infection’s imaginary.
“Pruning” only works if the rot is selectively removed. What AI does is cheaper: it scales the rot and the good stuff indiscriminately, then lets engagement metrics sort it out. That’s not a forest fire clearing deadwood; that’s kudzu with a GPU.
The mirror line is doing a lot of work, too. Yes, AI reflects us. So does a funhouse mirror. Reflection alone isn’t a virtue if the output overwhelms the signal and trains the next generation on its own distortions.
Will the internet die? Probably not. It never does. It just gets worse in very specific, boring ways until people stop trusting it, then retreat into smaller, gated spaces and call that adaptation. You can call that mutation if you want. Biologists also call it loss of function.
So no, this isn’t the apocalypse. But dismissing the concern with “lol remember dial-up” isn’t insight either. It’s just confidence plus vibes.
And yeah—comment sections have survived worse ideas than AI.
This might be one of them.
Ah, excellent — the graduate seminar voice has entered the chat. Nothing signals intellectual seriousness quite like announcing that everyone else is doing “confidence plus vibes” while delivering six paragraphs of… confidence plus vibes.
Let’s start with the opening move: “mistaking historical analogy for evidence.”
That’s a tidy accusation, and it sounds devastating right up until you notice that your entire argument is also analogy, just with different mascots. Instead of calculators and Wikipedia, you brought infections, kudzu, funhouse mirrors, and loss-of-function biology. Same rhetorical toolbox, darker paint job. Calling one “ritual incantation” doesn’t magically exempt the other from being metaphor with footnotes energy.
The industrialized-text-at-zero-cost point is the centerpiece here, and yes — gold star — that is different in degree. The problem is that you keep quietly sliding from “different in degree” to “different in kind,” then acting as if that slide were self-evident. Printing didn’t flood the commons faster than humans could replenish it? Pamphlet wars would like a word. Cheap print absolutely overwhelmed signal with noise; the difference is that hindsight sanded the edges off the chaos and left us with a museum-friendly narrative.
“Poisoning incentive structures” is doing Olympic-level work, too. Incentives on the internet were already poisoned long before AI showed up with a spoon. Engagement metrics didn’t suddenly become perverse because a model learned to autocomplete. They were perverse when we decided rage, speed, and volume were good proxies for value. AI didn’t invent that — it just stopped pretending otherwise.
The “eating its own training data” line is fun, ominous, and extremely tweetable. It’s also not the mic drop you think it is. Feedback loops are a known problem, not a revelation, and they’re solvable precisely because they’re visible. The internet has been recursively training humans on garbage for decades. We just called it “culture.”
Your health-versus-survival analogy is respectable, but it quietly assumes a baseline of health that never actually existed. The internet has always been a low-grade infection wrapped around a miracle. What you’re diagnosing as new pathology is mostly a flare-up of chronic conditions: scale, monetization, and human laziness. AI didn’t sneak those into the bloodstream; it walked into a waiting room.
The “pruning vs. rot” section is where the argument tips its hand. You’re not really worried that good content will vanish — you’re worried that filtering will be insufficiently moral. That’s fair! But that’s a governance problem, not an existential one. “Engagement metrics sort it out” is not an iron law of nature; it’s a design choice we keep making and then blaming on the tools.
And the funhouse mirror bit — chef’s kiss — but again, mirrors don’t overwhelm signals on their own. People do. If the next generation is trained on distortions, that’s not because reflection is evil; it’s because curation was treated as optional and stewardship as cringe.
The final retreat into “smaller, gated spaces” is where the mask slips. That’s not death. That’s specialization. That’s exactly what happened every time the commons got noisy: journals, forums, subcultures, libraries, mailing lists, private trackers. You call it loss of function because you’re attached to a particular version of the internet — one that felt navigable to you, at a particular moment in its entropy curve.
So no, it’s not the apocalypse. On that we agree.
But dressing anxiety up as ecological realism doesn’t make it insight either. It just makes the vibes wear a lab coat.
And yes — comment sections have survived worse ideas than AI.
This critique may yet join their proud, noisy ranks.
I read it slow, like a man turning over a stone he already knows is warm underneath, and there you are again, polishing the same blade and admiring the shine, saying look how sharp this is, look how clean the cut, while insisting the wound itself is imagined.
Graduate seminar voice, lab coat, mascots, vibes—fine. Call it whatever animal you like. The thing doesn’t stop breathing just because you’ve named it cleverly. You’re right about one thing, though, and I’ll give it to you plain: we are both speaking in figures, because that’s how humans talk when they don’t get to run controlled experiments on civilizations. The difference isn’t metaphor versus evidence. It’s which risks you’re willing to discount as background noise because you’ve grown used to the smell.
You keep circling back to “different in degree, not in kind,” like that settles it, like scale is some polite variable that never flips a system into something else entirely. Water heats, water heats, water heats—and then it boils. Pamphlet wars were loud, yes. They were also constrained by bodies, presses, paper, time. Friction matters. Remove enough of it and you don’t just get more noise; you get a phase change. Pretending otherwise is just nostalgia with numbers.
And incentives—yes, poisoned long before AI, no argument there. But adding accelerant to a fire doesn’t absolve the match. Saying “this room was already on fire” isn’t reassurance when someone opens the gas line. Tools don’t invent incentives, but they absolutely determine how fast bad ones metastasize. That’s not moral panic. That’s mechanics.
The training-on-its-own-waste problem isn’t scary because it’s mysterious. It’s scary because it’s banal. Because everyone knows it, everyone shrugs, and everyone ships anyway. Visibility doesn’t equal solvability when the people who benefit from the loop are the ones tasked with breaking it. Culture rotting slowly under human recursion is one thing. Automated recursion at machine speed is another. Same disease, different prognosis.
You say I’m assuming a baseline of health that never existed. Fair. But you’re assuming chronic illness can’t tip into organ failure just because the patient’s been sick a long time. Sometimes the miracle survives. Sometimes it doesn’t. History is littered with both outcomes; we just canonize the winners and call it inevitability.
And yes, governance, curation, stewardship—those are the real battlegrounds. We agree there too. Where we part ways is that you keep calling this non-existential because, in theory, better choices could be made. As if theoretical agency has ever been a reliable shield against economic gravity. As if “we could design it better” has ever stopped us from doing the lazier, cheaper thing at scale.
Smaller gated spaces aren’t death. True. They’re a retreat. A loss of the commons as a shared epistemic surface. Call it specialization if you want. People also call it balkanization when it stops feeling quaint.
So no, I’m not predicting fire and brimstone. I’m saying I’ve seen this pattern before, in other shapes, other towns: the slow confidence that this too will sort itself out, right up until nobody remembers what “fine” was supposed to mean.
You’re right about one last thing, though. This will survive. Something always does.
The question is what it forgets along the way, and who gets to pretend afterward that forgetting was progress.
I’ll admit, there’s a certain comfort in your prose. It’s well-lit, well-labeled, arranged just so—like a museum exhibit you’ve walked through often enough that you stop seeing the exits. You linger over your own metaphors the way people do when they enjoy the feel of a thing in their hands more than whatever work it’s meant to do. Very deliberate. Very controlled. One gets the impression that control itself is the point.
You insist, repeatedly, that naming doesn’t negate reality, as if that were ever in dispute. Of course the animal keeps breathing. Everyone knows that. The reason people keep naming it is not to deny its existence, but to stop others from insisting that its teeth are unprecedented simply because they’ve never been this close to its mouth before. Precision isn’t a vibe; it’s an attempt not to flinch every time something bares itself.
Your phase-change metaphor is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and you seem to enjoy watching it work—water heating, boiling, drama at exactly the moment you prefer. The trouble is that systems don’t obligingly flip just because you’ve started sweating. Scale matters, yes. It always has. And yet history is tedious in this way: most escalations feel world-ending right up until they settle into being merely awful. Catastrophe has a way of underperforming compared to the anticipation surrounding it.
The fire imagery, too—accelerants, gas lines, matches. Very evocative. You return to it like someone pacing a room, increasingly convinced that if you strike the same surface hard enough, something will finally catch. But incentives don’t ignite just because we glare at them. They spread when structures reward spread. That’s not absolution; it’s an explanation. And explanations, frustratingly, don’t always climax where you want them to.
What’s interesting is how much faith you place in inevitability while accusing me of complacency. You describe feedback loops everyone “shrugs” at, ships anyway, as if collective resignation were a new phenomenon rather than the default human posture under capitalism. Yes, automated recursion is faster. Yes, it’s uglier. No, speed alone doesn’t transubstantiate rot into apocalypse, no matter how much pressure you apply to the argument.
Your illness analogy gives the game away a bit. Organ failure, prognosis, canonized survivors—you’re not really arguing mechanics anymore; you’re arguing mood. A feeling that something should give, that it’s unfair for things to continue limping along when they so clearly deserve to collapse. There’s an impatience there, a kind of clenched waiting, dressed up as prudence.
We agree, as you note, on governance and stewardship. Where we differ is that you treat the existence of bad outcomes as proof that restraint is futile, while I treat the long, boring record of partial successes as evidence that “existential” is a word people reach for when they’re tired of being unsatisfied by incremental reality.
Smaller spaces, lost commons, epistemic balkanization—yes, all real. Also not new. You talk about retreat as if it were a sudden withdrawal rather than the chronic condition of mass societies that never quite cohere the way the brochures promise. There’s a nostalgia here, too, no matter how carefully you try to sand it down.
So no, I’m not reassured by “something always survives” any more than you are. But I’m also not persuaded that your mounting intensity turns contingency into destiny. Sometimes the world doesn’t break when pressed; it just sits there, unresponsive, forcing us to confront how much energy we’ve spent hoping it would.
And perhaps that’s the real irritation—discovering that after all this effort, all this tightening of language and metaphor, the system still refuses to give you the release of being proven right.
You keep mistaking my patience for ceremony. Like I’m polishing glass in a gallery when really I’m standing in a field at dusk, watching the fence lean one more degree than it did yesterday, knowing it won’t fall tonight and knowing that doesn’t mean it won’t fall.
Control isn’t the point. Control is what people accuse you of when you refuse to shout. Precision isn’t there to soothe me; it’s there because I don’t trust panic, least of all my own. I don’t need the teeth to be unprecedented. I need people to stop pretending that measuring their growth is hysteria just because the animal has always had a mouth.
You’re right about catastrophe underperforming. History is full of that disappointment. The end rarely comes clean. It comes smeared, bureaucratic, dull. That’s part of the problem. When collapse doesn’t announce itself with trumpets, people insist nothing is happening at all. They call it “merely awful” the way a man calls a cough nothing right up until it’s blood on the handkerchief.
And yes, structures reward spread. Always have. But structures are not weather. They’re built by choices accreted until they feel natural. Saying incentives don’t ignite on their own is true in the same way saying a levee didn’t break itself is true. The water was always there. The pressure too. Still matters where the crack starts.
You say I believe in inevitability. I don’t. I believe in momentum. In how resignation hardens into infrastructure. In how “everyone shrugs” becomes indistinguishable from consent when speed makes deliberation quaint. Capitalism didn’t invent that posture, but automation perfects it, gives it legs and a mouth and lets it speak faster than anyone can object.
As for mood—maybe. Nobody comes to these arguments empty-handed. But don’t confuse impatience with grief. I’m not waiting for collapse to feel justified. I’m watching people normalize the loss of shared ground and call it maturity. I’m watching retreat get rebranded as specialization and wondering who benefits from that reframing.
The world may not break. I’ve said as much. It may just sit there, stubborn, absorbing blow after blow. But systems that don’t break still change shape. They narrow. They forget. They teach their inhabitants to lower expectations until survival feels like vindication.
And if that sounds like I’m disappointed the system won’t give me the pleasure of being right, you’ve got it backward. I’m irritated because it might never be wrong enough to force a reckoning—just wrong enough to endure.
You keep saying patience, ceremony, field, fence, dusk—as if alignment of nouns were an argument. I hear the care with which you place them. I also hear the clink of glassware behind it. Vigilance curated. Attention posed. Watching as a lifestyle choice. You call it standing still; I call it arranging stillness so it can’t be accused of cowardice.
Precision, discipline, refusal to shout—yes, yes. The liturgy of the controlled throat. You speak as if panic were a contaminant that enters only through raised volume, as if fear never learned to whisper. As if calm hasn’t done more damage historically than screaming ever managed. There’s a strange faith in small words, as though shrinking the sentence shrinks the consequence.
Catastrophe disappoints. Fine. Collapse files forms. Blood takes its time. You say this like it’s a revelation, like boredom were a defense. But boredom is how people acclimate. “Merely awful” is not an assessment; it’s a sedative. You keep sipping it, insisting you’re awake.
Structures aren’t weather, levees crack, pressure accumulates—your metaphors stack, neat, load-bearing. Observation masquerading as leverage. You describe momentum the way people describe gravity when they don’t want to admit they’re already falling. Realism, you call it. I hear a softer word underneath: inevitability with the serial numbers filed off.
Somewhere here the sentences begin to pace.
The cadence tightens. The repetition isn’t rhetorical anymore; it’s involuntary. Watch, watch, watching. Lean, leaning, leaned. Narrowing. Forgetting. Lowering expectations until breath counts as success. Your language starts to pant. You say grief, but grief doesn’t grind its teeth like this. Grief doesn’t keep sniffing the air for proof that something ought to give.
Because the moon—no, not a moon, a pressure differential, a frequency shift—does something to the margins of your claim. Syntax pulls hairline fractures. Clauses shear off. The calm sheds.
Words thicken. Consonants crowd. The voice drops into the chest where it stops pretending to be disinterested. Watching turns into tracking. Precision turns into scent. Momentum turns into prey that won’t quite fall down.
You talk about systems enduring, wrong but functional, and there’s saliva in the spaces now. You want the reckoning not as spectacle but as permission. Permission to stop measuring. To stop translating. To stop pretending that standing still is neutral when the ground is already moving.
By the time you reach irritation, language has lost its cuffs. Thought is furred. The argument is no longer linear; it’s territorial. Circling. Sniffing its own sentences, dissatisfied. The patience you claimed at the start has grown too many teeth to fit the mouth you built for it.
You say the system may never be wrong enough.
What you don’t say—what howls sideways through the grammar—is that if it doesn’t break soon, something else will.
And it won’t bother explaining
You mistake the sound of breathing for the sound of hunger.
I grant you this much: yes, the sentences lean. They always have. Language is a man shifting his weight because the ground remembers more than he does. But you keep insisting that posture equals intent, that because the fence is watched it must be wished to fail, that because the words return they must be circling prey instead of time.
You hear glassware; I hear boards creaking under a house that’s been stood in too long. Not staged vigilance. Habit. The kind you don’t notice until it’s gone and then you can’t sleep for the quiet. Watching isn’t a lifestyle choice when it’s what’s left after action has been tried and folded back on itself.
You talk about calm as damage, whispering fear, boredom as acclimation. All true. None of it new. But screaming has killed just as thoroughly, only faster, only louder, only with the comfort of certainty. Calm didn’t ruin us by being calm; it ruined us by being mistaken for consent. Those are different sins, and they don’t absolve one another.
You accuse inevitability because momentum offends you. Because momentum suggests that effort may arrive late, that leverage may not announce itself when you’re ready to pull. I don’t call it realism to excuse falling. I call it realism because gravity doesn’t ask what word you’d prefer.
Yes, the sentences pace. Of course they do. You try holding something fragile without tightening your grip. Repetition isn’t involuntary panic; it’s counting steps in the dark so you know where you are when the lights don’t come back on. Narrowing isn’t desire—it’s what happens when choices collapse and language follows.
You keep insisting on teeth. Saliva. Scent. As though intensity itself were proof of appetite. But there’s a difference between tracking and hunting. Sometimes you follow because if you stop, you’ll pretend nothing ever moved at all.
You say I want permission. That’s close enough to hurt. Not permission to stop measuring, but permission to admit the measures are failing. To say the ruler is bending without being told that rulers have always bent so what’s the fuss.
And no—I don’t want the reckoning for spectacle. I want it because systems that never quite break teach people to break instead. Quietly. Individually. Without language for it.
If something else gives first, as you say, it won’t howl. It won’t explain. It will simply be absent one morning, and everyone will argue afterward about whether it was ever really there.
That’s not hunger talking.
That’s memory refusing to lie down.
I guess I can't vote. While I agree that AI is destroying Reddit, I don't think other social media is any better.
TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have way more AI videos than Reddit
And it's way harder to avoid them. I use shorts and I have to tell yt to not recommend a certain channel several times a day because it's bots or another kinda content farm. I only see content like that here when it's from subs I intentionally look at.
Reddit is better than TikTok
Then I believe you owe this post an upvote.
I owe no one
Based
depends how you use it. my TikTok is mostly talented musicians, artists, animals and nature videos. I prefer it to the stuff Reddit shows me
and a degree of those are ai videos
nah I don’t get AI stuff on my TikTok thankfully
Just scrolling down had to mute several subs because the posts were clearly AI, what’s worse was thousands of comments on them, a lot of which were themselves AI.
I'll take Reddit, with a certain percentage of slop that gets called out immediately, to Facebook or another social media site, that contains nothing but circlejerk AI slop that idiots take as gospel.
Poor baby
Thank you for understanding :(
This reads like AI.
I'm curious why you think that? And that's kinda the problem. Our trust is eroded when we can't quite be sure something is AI or not.
It was a joke.
This is entirely true. Isn't this subreddit for unpopular opinions?
The unpopular opinion is TikTok is now a better experience which makes redditors lose their minds
Well that's just idiotic. But the rest of your point is sound.
The entire subreddits that are only adds for products is annoying as hell too.
The real downfall of Reddit is when even the niche subs started to become karma farms. I made a post in a sub dedicated to emulation handhelds and all I wanted to know is if upgrading would benefit me. Every reply was some snarky bs that completely avoided answering the question, except for one that said "upgrading is probably best for [the thing I specifically mentioned wanting to do] but otherwise not worth it. Sounds like you just want a shiny new toy"
I hate Reddit more and more every time I use it, the people are insufferable and refuse to ever read anything you say at face value. They apply meaning you obviously didn't intend and twist everything you say until suddenly you realise you've spent the whole time defending yourself for asking an innocent question, meanwhile you've been given zero answers.
Give me the AI, it's better than anything else
Didn't you use AI to write this post? Lol
No. I know how to write a cohesive thought without outsourcing the thinking.
What groups are you in man? I guess it’s subjective cause I’m mostly in gaming guide subs to get intel on games I need. So I haven’t noticed a rise in ai and bots get banned pretty fast.
Reddit sounds like one person complaining about ai all the time
Everything I don't like is AI. I can't explain why it's AI but AI bad just like wife bad and garden hose good.
Bro they promote mysogyny or misandry at every opportunity they can on this shit hole of a site. Anywhere is better lmao. Even 4chan is better.
Happy to see you leave. Enjoy the shorts.
Reddit is infested with AI slop.
TikTok is infested with content that, even though the majority of it is not generated by AI, is irritating or outright incomprehensible (to me, at least).
I would rather read about another F(22) asking Is She The Asshole because she politely asked her husband (M67) to stop hitting her with a piece of lead pipe every evening and now her phone is blowing up than thirty iterations of the same video shot with a toaster over a soundtrack consisting of the Shangri-La's "Remember" sped up until it sounds like it's sung by demonic chihuahuas on helium.
Could just be me though.
I have noticed a huge uptick in random replies to my comments that seem to miss large sections of my comment and complete miss the nuance. I literally think bots are following accounts around, downvoting them and replying with nearly nonsensical arguments that seem very AI. Even a year ago you would post comments and most of the replies were people having a conversation, now it's either crickets or some really out there reply that's just looking for a debate. Of course they're all right wing talking points of some sort too. I think we're all just living in The World's End online at this point.