In around 2005 or so I went back to look at a Usenet newsgroup which had been a major part of my online life in the 1990s. All the people had gone, but the spambots were still there and the entire group was just bot spam posted at nobody and read by no one. The bots were even replying to one another’s threads. A forum where multiple IRL human friendships had been forged over the years was nothing more than grifting robots spamming at each other.

It’s fully 20 years later and the same shit is going down with a new coat of paint.