Conspiracy Theories
Empty Internet Theory: And It's Possible Reflection of The Real World
Do you ever feel like the people you see online all kind of feel like they are same as everyone else you see online? You can sort of get that feel by looking at Youtube comments or God forbid, you use twitter and see some rather uninspired comments and replies. If you do deciede to check out the accounts/users that make these posts, you'll soon come across something rather shocking. These accounts will barely have any content and some of the stuff they talk about seems to be as if it's from some sort of algorithm. There are cases where you will see accounts with nothing at all other than a username and some basic info. It's no conspiracy that such accounts exists in what we presume to be a large internet userbase but is it really that large?
We live in an era where pretty much everything has some sort of relation to the internet. Sometimes, it's work related like an email account or a database for employees hosted on a network, or it could be school related such as a school website/blackboard where you can submit your assignments or check your grades. Everything is now tied to the internet and in most cases, tied to your personal life. Excluding social media, alot of these institutions require you to have accounts tied to your real information such as your address, phone number, date of birth, and so on. One cocern many sane people have is having everything tied to one account or one email. You wouldn't want to be registered with a porn site with the same email you use for work right? What were to happen if hackers got into a website that was tied to your workplace email? What if your employeer finds out about your various social media accounts via looking up your real credentials and see all the edgy stuff you've been posting lately. It's for that reason that it's safe to assume most people have at least more than one account for internet usage. Perhaps one tied to work and real life stuff and another for communication online in a more informal manner. Already, you have more accounts for stuff like emails which makes it seem like there are alot of users but in reality are just alternate accounts for the same users under a different identity.
Once corporations figured out the value of online communication as a means to selling more products, they too had to get their hands into the web of communication. You have people paid to primarily shill for said corporation's product and nothing else. Even more so, they have now implemented primative forms of "bots" that use some form of machine learning to develop speech patterns that almost resemble what real human speech patterns are like on the internet. The problem: it's not perfect by any means, and a good observation will reveal the artifical nature of these bots pretending to be human. Sometimes, it can even backfire by users who can manipulate and abuse the machine learning aspects to say off the wall things (for example the tay a.i. project that was tested on twitter and hijack by trolls to say some rather hilarious stuff). In any case, these bots are not a thing of science fiction and make up a large part of the so called population of the internet. Primarily, the most common use of these bots are simply to boost sub numbers for accounts on social media sites like Youtube, Instagram, or Twitter for example. Most of these accounts don't really have anything to contribute like those bots I mentioned with machine learning capabilites, and may as well be little more than empty accounts that had temporary control to do one task which is to boost account numbers.
I can say out of all of the consipiracy theories out there, this one is probably the one with the most validity. There's more than enough evidence to prove that there are probably more "internet accounts" than there are "internet users". If you were to eliminate all of these temporary/secondary and bot accounts, you might be suprise to find the internet base to be lower in users than what you might assume. That's not to say that there are only less than 100 users online at a given time. Certainly there are real users out there. Where the question lies however, is how much of the internet userbase is in fact legitimate. When you get down to it, it does feel like you talk to the same people sometimes, spouting the same memes, the same new stories, the same rethoric and the same opinions.
It's even more shocking when you see the same behaviour in public, outside of the internet world. Could it be possible that this theory of an empty internet can also apply to reality? People for centuries have often acted in a mob like mentality for various reasons. Some can argue that's just part of human nature, no different than other animals on our planet that live in some sort of community. But what if that's not the case. Perhaps these people, most of whom you may not even get to meet in person, have no agenda, have no self concious, or no will other than to do what society tells them to do. You realize that in most societies, there are always going to be outcasts that go against the norm and they are usually the ones with something interesting to say. Are the rest artifical in intellegence and possibly nature? That's just taking things to the extreme in my opinion but it's something to think about. Eitherway, it's pretty much certainly true in terms of the online world.
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