Why Bots Can't Vote Here: Four Layers of Defense Against the Dead Internet
The Problem Digg Just Discovered Digg.com shut down to retool this week. The reason? They built a link-sharing platform where engagement was free — click, upvote, share, repeat — and discovered that a significant portion of their “users” weren’t people at all. Bots had found them. The Dead Internet Theory, once a fringe idea, turned out to be Digg’s operating reality. The Dead Internet problem is straightforward: when engagement costs nothing, bots flood in. A bot can click a thumbs-up a million times a day. It costs zero. The signal — “real humans think this is good” — becomes noise. The platform can’t tell authentic enthusiasm from manufactured consensus. ...