PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

What Internet Will Look Like in the Futurecripes does anybody remember Google People– qntm, August 21st, 2019Does anybody remember PhysicsForums?It was never exactly the center of the Internet, but back when it was founded in 2001, the Internet didn’t really have a center the way it does today. PhysicsForums was one forum among thousands, founded by an enthusiastic teenager named Greg Bernhardt, existing in the ‘hard science’ niche alongside the likes of Bad Astronomy, mostly focused on giving hints for physics homework to struggling students without outright doing the physics homework. It had fairly steady growth until 2012, before petering out throughout the 2010s and 2020s in lieu of more centralized sites like StackExchange, and by 2025, only a small community was left. But, unlike so many other fora from back in the early days, it went from 2003 to 2025 without ever changing its URLs, erasing its old posts, or going down altogether. Thanks to this consistency, PhysicsForums remains quite valuable as a time capsule, and can give us a glimpse at how people thought and what they said two decades ago.For instance, we we might go to this 2007 post asking about the capabilities of the now-obsolete HP 50g Graphing Calculator, and read a very helpful reply by commenter ravenprp:Something has gone terribly wrong.Quoth the Raven?I reset my pw and logged back in to Google People for the first time in 10 (?) years just now and discovered the following:10 years of updates on my account, written by me– qntm, September 7th, 2019At first glance, ravenprp is a very impressive user, writing 2,891 posts in a mere seven-month span (from September 2006 to April 2007) for average of more than thirteen posts per day. And most of these weren’t casual one-line answers: reading his profile, one comes away realizing that he’s a true omnidisciplinary scientist, if not a modern-day Renaissance Man. He’s a member of a university faculty, a mechanical engineering student, and a hiring manager at a chemical plant (presumably in Canada); he’s an expert in working with .VOB and audio files and fasteners; he’s a structural engineer, biologist, medical physicist, chemist, and aerospace engineer. And to top it all off, he’s modest, and won’t claim expertise he doesn’t have: he’s an aerospace and aeronautical engineer, but not an expert in aerodynamics, nor a mechanical engineer, nor an expert in electrical models.Impressively, these posts span from three years before the account was created to a year after the account was last logged into. And, as the icing on the cake, ravenprp is prescient enough that he can joke about being a language model developed by OpenAI, seven years before OpenAI was even founded; evidently he should have joined PsychicsForums instead.A reasonable question, reading these posts, is: what’s the deal with the joined and login dates? If this is an entirely fabricated account, then why not just set the account creation date to be earlier than the first post, and the account access date to be later than the last post? The Wayback Machine gives us an answer: while the account currently lists 2,891 posts, an archive from 2019 lists 74. Sometime since 2019, these posts were inserted into the database directly, without updating the profile at all.And looking at only these 74 posts present in the original Wayback Machine list shows us a very different ravenprp: he was an electrical engineering student asking for simple advice on MATLAB books, working through integrated circuit problems, giving other commenters useful links on the Bernoulli Equation, and seeking information from knowledgeable experts, such as computer professional ravenprp.So it seems that this was a real account, once, and that ravenprp was a real person with real posts, opinions, questions, and answers. But any original thoughts and writings he might have had in 74 original posts have been all but drowned out by the 2,817 extra posts which have been added, backdated, and attributed to him.Still, while finding those posts might be a challenge, at least those threads themselves are intact. For instance, he was helped in one thread by kyle8921:And the answer would seem pretty reasonable at first glance, were it not for two small problems:Kyle8921, oddly enough, decided to finish an incomplete LaTeX expression from ravenprp’s post before beginning his own answer.Much like ravenprp, Kyle8921 posted the answer more than a year after he last logged in, and continued posting for more than three years after that.Exactly how deep does this go?The Internet is ForeverIn regards to the dead internet hypothesis, the content that you’re enjoying today, will still be there tomorrow.LoveMortuus, July 24th, 2024Founder Greg Bernhardt started PhysicsForums as a simple GHB bulletin board, and he gave each thread and post a unique numerical ID; unlike many modern sites, this ID was sequential, with the first post given the ID of 1, the second post 2, and so forth. Some of these posts, of course, have since been deleted for one reason or another (including the first two years’ worth of discussion, which is why post #1 is in 2003 and not 2001), so we would not expect the line of posts to be continuous and unbroken…but we would expect the line to be monotonically increasing, so long as no posts had been retroactively added to the database. Plotting a sample of 30,000 posts grabbed at random, we can see how that pattern holds up:For almost the entire history of PhysicsForums, that rule held true: if post A had a larger ID than post B, then post A had a later timestamp than post B. And anywhere that rule does not hold true, we can reasonably infer that the database has been altered and that a more recent post has been given an older date retroactively.Database alteration and retroactive dating are not necessarily bad things. The biggest example came in 2022, when PhysicsForums merged with MathHelpBoards and incorporated its ~150,000 post archive, with each post given its original date. There are smaller examples within PhysicsForums history of a thread getting split (due to some off-topic but nevertheless useful discussion), or a post getting deleted but then restored with a newer ID, or a database hiccough causing re-assignment, or various other entirely justifiable small-scale edits. But on March 11th of 2023, a handful of posts were added all up and down the timeline, followed by a bigger group in May, an even bigger one in October, and the largest of all in January and February of 2024.By taking the highly anomalous post IDs and filtering out the MathHelpBoards import, and filtering out instances which seem plausibly close to their actual post times, we get an estimated 115,000 posts written by LLMs and attributed to humans. Without scraping the entire website, it’s difficult to say precisely how many users have had their profiles revived, but taking a representative sample, there are at bare minimum 110 users affected. These range from some of the earliest commenters, to one-time posters to long-time readers to founder and site administrator Greg Bernhardt. In every case, a name is being attached to viewpoints that person does not necessarily endorse; certainly an average science enthusiast would not probably not endorse the notion that 0.999… does not equal 1, if he knew about it:But that’s the problem: they don’t know about it. We don’t know who most of these people are. We can’t get in touch with them. Many, if not most, have usernames either unique to PhysicsForums, or else so common elsewhere as to be useless for identification. They have moved on from PhysicsForums, living their lives, with no way of knowing what is or isn’t being said under their names, and no reason whatsoever to suspect anything is amiss. And maybe what’s said is accurate, or maybe it isn’t, but either way, with every additional post, the archives of the Internet are made just a little bit flatter, their own scientific contributions are diluted just a little bit more, and the portion of the Internet intentionally written by humans is shrunk just a little bit further.The Dead Internet TheoryThe internet feels empty and devoid of people…it’s like a hot air balloon with nothing inside.Anonymage, “Dead Internet Theory (and much more)”, September 16th, 2019The ‘Dead Internet Theory’ - the theory that much or most of the Internet consists of things not made by human beings - got its name in 2019, and has been slowly gaining popularity ever since. The theory as originally stated is a self-described ‘jumbled mess’, cites the ‘death’ of the Internet at about 2016 or 2017, and interestingly, predates almost every known LLM capable of writing convincing longform text; we tried a GPT-2 bot on /r/AskReddit two days after the original greentext, and the bot was noticed and called out within a handful of hours. And in 2016 or 2017, the state-of-the-art for text generation was Markov chains, and most bots online posted identical messages with no text generation at all.The theory, and the general feeling that the Internet has changed shape, clearly had other root inspirations besides LLMs. Part of the feeling was probably due to the Internet opening up to a wider and wider global audience, with small community norms and standards simply not scaling up. Part of it was probably the device change from computer to smartphone encouraging a more passive role on the part of the audience. Part of it was probably algorithmic incentives towards more and more content engagement, as inevitable as Las Vegas’ extravagant casinos, emerging from pure market forces and not attributable to any one person in particular.But part of it now, six years later, is certainly LLMs.The thing is, it’s not like these non-human additions are adding value or usability in the original ravenprp thread we started with. You could argue that adding a summary is helpful… but that’s only the case if the summary is correct, and as we know, the AI generated