AI accounts are the final nail in the coffin for the user-generated content era of the web. RIP UGC, 1994 - 2024. We started with Usenet, message boards, Geoci

AI accounts are the final nail in the coffin for the user-generated content era of the web. RIP UGC, 1994 - 2024. We started with Usenet, message boards, Geocities and Blogspot. Then all the traffic migrated to aggregators like Facebook, Reddit and Instagram which prioritize engagement-heavy sensationalism. Real people used to post all that content, but it's been clear for a while that sharecropping on somebody else's platform benefits them, not you. It used to be possible to build up a following and sell some Tshirts or get a few Patreon subs. But now it's simply not worth the hassle when every piece of original content is getting sucked into an AI training model and Instagram is openly telling users to pay to 'promote' their posts in the algorithm. The bottom is falling out of the so-called bottomless pit of doomscroll machines, so instead of offering a better product, they're propping up its corpse with a hollow, computationally expensive facsimile of the real thing.