Discoverability and bots

These days it is my belief that many popular places of discourse on the internet are home to a large number of 'bots' (which usually LLMs) who are successfully passing the unconcious Turing Test. These bots are usually put there, I believe, to aid in the influence of the masses, making these huge conglomorations of people's thoughts the best place to insert an agent of propaganda. I would think that this is only present on non-phone exclusive platforms like Discord and Reddit, although I believe that such bots are also present on phone platforms like Instagram and TikTok (and their Oriental equivalents), although I cannot know for sure as I have no way of checking these platforms. These sites are popular and so are easily discoverable, and vice versa. They usually deem themselves so popular that in order to stop bots from engaging on the platform they introduce strange measures to prove that the user is a human (though I am fairly sure that any other sentient intelligence knowing English could also pass the tests). These may include solving a silly 'Captcha' (a perception puzzle) or more omninously, requiring a phone number or government ID. These are duct-tape solutions to a problem that will not go away while a platform is popular. They may do as many checks as they want, but with no pure way to determine that a user is a human (which is difficult considering that you can only expect so much information to be given through a web API interface) it will forever be a problem plaguing them. I think that is instead clear that truly finding humans on the internet is requiring you to seek out places that are not discoverable, that are not popular, and require at least a little bit of work to get there. Think of it as finding the old wise man in the mountains who knows many things, except that this man only has knowledge on a very specific subject and his cave looks like a Web 1.0 website.

On the so-called 'smol' web, it is improbable to find bots. I believe this is because it is difficult to create a bot that will fulfill a specific niche that is determined by their 'hobbies' and 'expertise' and then creatively make a website based around this. Not only is such a bot difficult to create, it is also not incentivised because no site like this gets a particulary large amount of traffic. Perhaps a hundred views a month, a guess based on some of the websites I look at and would consider to be truly part of the smol web. So you do not have a large volume of people's opinions to manipulate, and not only that but what opinion could you possibly want to change by attacking through the angle of someone's hobby (like mechanical computers for example)? Can a national movement be made towards a liking for planned economy by stating that your mechanical machine does exactly what you tell it to, and that it can map to an economy with only a few simple abstractions and translations? I think not. A website that is dedicated to politics will likely be one that espouses a mainstream view of the time, and because of that will pick up momentum and become popular. Politics websites holding views outside of what is considered normal by the people viewing it will remain a curiosity and will not generate a large audience to convince.

I think that the way to stay away from non-human made writings and creations is to go to places that are not as discoverable. These places do not have incentives for bot-deployers to go, and I would say in general anyway that such places house better thoughts than those elsewhere. Your sources should be distributed and not be subject to the findings of the masses, because they hold hidden power over things from their numbers and this entices many people to create various contraptions to snare and control them. Remain separate from the emotional herd and seek out the old hermits yourself.

Perhaps this article should have been a clever metaphor for how these bots and their invasions of shallowness and unknowing use as manipulation tools mirror the society of the masses today. I suppose I will leave this exercise to the reader.