July 26, 2024 - Reading time: 8 minutes

If you are a frequent Internet user, you may notice an interesting phenomenon: a mismatch between your expectations of how many people should be engaged in various issues, and the actual reality. This situation is especially common on social media. For example, I recently joined a Facebook group with about 5 million members, but when I looked at the group's activity, I saw only about 10 people asking questions and making comments.

The same was true for Reddit. Conduct a test: go to Reddit and examine discussions in communities with over 200,000 members, where more than 50 members are online. You will hardly see any comments, and the ones you do see are often generic, like "Aha!" Recently, I tested this by posting a message in the group "MeaningOfLife," which has about 4k members. I was thrilled to receive one comment, but the group seemed completely inactive otherwise.

Next, visit Reddit's main page. You'll likely notice that 100% of the most popular posts are mundane, and honestly, quite silly, such as, "My girlfriend got a terrible haircut and she's crying," which garner thousands of comments and upvotes. While I suspect many of these comments and upvotes are from bots, it still raises questions. Why does this happen? Who (or what) is steering such discussions and with what purpose? Programmable bots? But who programmed them?

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