Buelldozer

The bot problem has been around since before Sam Altman was old enough to legally drink. For example in the early days the founders of Reddit were running bots to make the site look wayyy busier than it actually was in order to attract new users.

He’s a convenient bogey-man, and a huge asshole, but he’s the not the source of this problem.

but breaking down what’s different I can’t pin anything concrete down.

One big difference is scale. The 2000s Internet was primarily centered around single(ish) interest forums with relatively low user counts. The entire Lemmy-verse, which is itself quite tiny in 2025, is still WAY larger than nearly any of the 2000s era forums ever were.

Another other big difference is why the user base is online. The majority of them aren’t participating to discuss a shared interest anymore, they are doing it for general entertainment or to earn money.

Those two things explain nearly all of the change. Way more users congregated into a handful of websites with many of them, including the sites, attempting to get rich doing it.

The 2000s web was a much smaller number of users spread across a zillion websites / forums with nearly all of the users and site operators doing it without money as a motivator.

MySpace was social media and had none of the toxicity.

Usenet was Social Media and it had allllll the toxicity.

There isn’t a single county in this country that votes 100% in either direction. So saying that “All of whom voted for this.” is objectively incorrect.

I’m in Wyoming and fiber started rolling out in multiple cities with multiple different providers in each city two years ago. They got to my house earlier this year so I now have a 2Gb/s connection.

I’m confused. The article is talking about “BEAD” which wasn’t passed until 2021. You must be talking about a different program.