Dead Internet Theory

Summary

Dead Internet Theory Jan 18, 2026 · 6 min read #Technology #Internet The other day I was browsing my one-and-only social network — which is not a social network, but I’m tired of arguing with people online about it — HackerNews. It’s like this dark corner of the internet, where anonymous tech-enthusiasts, scientists, entrepreneurs, and internet-troll, like to lurk. I like HackerNews. It helps me stay up-to-date about recent tech news (like Cloudflare acquiring Astro which makes me happy for the Astro team, but also sad and worried since I really like Astro, and big-tech has a tendency to ruin things); it mostly avoids politics; and it’s not a social network. And, in the fashion of HackerNews, I stumbled upon someone sharing their open-source project. It’s great to see people work on their projects and decide to show them to the world. I think people underestimate the fear of actually shipping stuff, which involves sharing it with the world. Upon glancing at the comment section, I started to see other anonymous participants questioning the validity of said open-source project in terms of how much of it was AI-generated. I grabbed my popcorn, and started to follow this thread. More accusations started to appear: the commit timeline does not make sense; the code has AI-generated comments; etc. And at the same time, the author tried to reply to every comment claiming that they wrote this 100% without using AI. I don’t mind people using AI to write code, even though I tried to resist it myself, until eventually succumbing to it. But I think it’s fair to disclose the use of AI, especially in open-source software. People on the internet are, mostly, anonymous, and it’s not always possible to verify the claims or expertise of particular individuals. But as the amount of code is growing, considering that everyone is using AI to generate whatever-app they want, it’s impossible to verify every piece of code we are going to use. So it’s fair to know, I think, if some ...