I lost my account of 12 years when I quoted some random misogynist for calling a woman a slur, the mod or automod banned me for making the quote (which I did so he couldn’t edit his message and I simultaneously reported him anyway) I figured it was just a simple mistake, but they didn’t listen to my appeal, I tried to talk to other mods and they were all unimaginably obtuse assholes, so I got banned from that particular subreddit that I was a well-liked regular contributor on. To keep talking to the people I knew there I used an alt account for a while and then got lifetime IP banned for ban-evasion.

It’s not that hard to make a new account and erase your cookies and reset your modem, etc etc. But now they have more and more tricks for removing humans, like shadowbanning anyone who ever says anything contentious, which is what they really want, completely synthetic communities of bots talking about whatever narrative they want to seed into the public narrative.

I estimate about 1/4 to half the users on the larger communities are all AI/bots. Once you realize it and look at all the posts and conversations in this framing you realize how utterly twisted and insidious our tech oligarchy has really become. They seem very human, they even make populist-sounding, human arguments and follow popular sentiment, which makes their narratives and concessions stand out.

The internet isn’t just dead, it’s a reanimated corpse cursed to follow the will of its lich-lords.