Posted By: Stacey
Maybe I’m getting old, but I genuinely don’t understand what’s happening on Reddit anymore. The whole point of forums used to be connecting with real people, sharing real experiences, asking questions, and having actual conversations. Now it seems like every other post is either written by AI or copied from somewhere else entirely. What exactly is the point?
I was scrolling through Reddit recently and noticed several posts that felt incredibly fake. The stories sounded polished, the wording felt robotic, and the responses were almost too perfect. Then I started seeing people openly admit they’re using AI to generate posts just to get engagement. That’s when I realized this is becoming a real thing.
What confuses me is why. Why spend time creating fake stories, fake questions, and fake experiences just to collect internet points? Karma doesn’t pay your bills. Karma doesn’t get you a promotion. Karma doesn’t improve your life.
Yet some people seem obsessed with getting thousands of upvotes from strangers they’ll never meet. The weirdest part is when I discovered that some of my old tweets had been reposted to Reddit years later. Friends and family started sending me screenshots asking, “Isn’t this your tweet?”
Sure enough, there it was. A tweet I had made years ago was getting thousands of upvotes, comments, awards, and engagement from people who had no idea where it originally came from. Meanwhile, I wasn’t getting any credit for it.
I sat there thinking, “Why?”
What is the purpose?
Is it attention?
Validation?
A dopamine hit from watching numbers go up? I honestly don’t get it. The internet already has enough fake content. We have fake influencers, fake experts, fake gurus, fake reviews, and now apparently fake conversations too.
The thing I always loved about forums was authenticity. I liked reading about someone’s actual work experience. I liked hearing someone’s real-life relationship problem. I liked hearing genuine opinions from real people. Now it feels like we’re moving toward a place where nobody even knows if they’re talking to a human anymore. And honestly, that’s kind of sad.
What’s even stranger is that many of these AI-generated posts get more attention than real posts. Someone can spend thirty minutes writing about a genuine life experience and get ignored. Meanwhile, an AI-generated story can rack up thousands of upvotes overnight.
Maybe that’s what bothers me the most. The internet rewards engagement, not authenticity. The more outrageous, emotional, or controversial something is, the more likely it is to go viral. At some point, aren’t we defeating the purpose of community?
Forums were supposed to be places where people connected with other people. If everyone is posting AI-generated content for karma, engagement, or traffic, then what’s left? I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something. But personally, I’d rather read a messy, imperfect post written by a real person than a flawless AI-generated story designed to farm upvotes. At least then I know there’s a human being on the other side of the screen. Am I the only one who feels this way?
