The problem of missing people on the Internet

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?

Here's more: Recently, I spoke with a friend who has over 20,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), and he mentioned that getting 3-5 comments on a post is considered a success. My experience on X is similar. I rarely see comments from unknown people, and each post typically adds one "follower" with a questionable profile. By examining these profiles, it's hard to believe they are active individuals capable of creating meaningful content. Most of the time they simply re-post someone's posts.

I suspect that not all accounts on social media platforms represent real people. Companies use various tactics to encourage human engagement on their platforms. I wouldn't be surprised if many group "members" and "followers'' are just bots designed to encourage real users to post messages. As someone once joked, real people are only needed to perform hard physical labor and burn gas furnaces to generate electricity in order to keep conversations going between various Internet bots, which are psychologically encouraging real people to increase their engagement and thus view more ads.

As a software-minded person, I conducted a few tests to understand how many real people pay attention to social media posts. I created several highly engaging posts with "read more" links to an external article where I could track the number of visitors. I found that, for X/Twitter, for every 100 views of my post claimed by the platform, only about 5 real people actually clicked on the link. This might explain why the "Truth Social" platform (an alternative to X) doesn't even display the number of views. The real "truth" is that these numbers reveal little about actual human engagement.

TikTok, Instangram and Pininterest are not doing significantly better. It is virtually impossible to find active discussions on topics that offer substantial knowledge content. The top positions on these platforms are fully dominated by pranks, hoaxes and fabricated content interspersed with ads. All such websites can be accurately described as entertainment platforms, mediated by bots and algorithms, with the primary goal of embedding ads into your mind. Some might argue that these platforms facilitate communication, but is that really the case? And do you believe the interactions are genuinely between real people?

Here is another story related to Google. Recently, I decided to buy "viewers" and "subscribers" for one of my YouTube channels. Why not, if Google offers it? If you do not buy views, the typical rate for most YouTube channels is 1 to 2 views per week. This is how Google and similar companies make money: you buy their product—views! When I configured advertising using YouTube Studio, I requested that the advertising should only be targeted at the US and Canada (the YouTube Studio default includes India and the Philippines—a very interesting trick). Well, I did not want that advertising running in India. Okay, I spent $100 and got about 10,000 views and 1,000 subscribers. This really worked! However, when I checked YouTube Studio after spending $100, it appeared that 97% of the views and subscribers were from India and the Philippines! What the heck! From the profiles of these 1,000 subscribers, it was very clear they were just "click" farms in India. I had bought 1,000 bots! There were only a few real accounts, and I received only one comment, "Wow!" from these 1,000 bot-subscribers.

This mismatch between expectations and reality is evident in many situations on the Internet. I recall that several years ago, one of my articles was nominated for deletion on Wikipedia. Typically, about 20 articles are marked for deletion by Wikipedia editors every day, and the platform claims to have around 70,000 active editors. However, when I had to defend my old but well-written article, which included numerous external citations, I found myself arguing with just two editors who seemed to want to remove the article based on their personal preferences. My question was: where are the rest of the 70,000 editors who could weigh in on the issue? In fact, if you look at Wikipedia's deletion log of articles, you typically see only 2-3 people debating among themselves. And they are not even the authors! So, where are all these editors and authors?

In fact, one of my friends pointed out that a significant number of Wikipedia articles are edited (and deleted!) by just a few usernames, often without any identified credentials on their "Talk" pages. What's going on?, he wondered. Reports of superusers contributing to a massive number of Wikipedia articles have even caught the attention of mainstream media. However, with Wikipedia, there's something else at play too - some articles clearly appear to be the result of automated parsing of available literature, rather than being created by humans.

Such examples are numerous and extend beyond social media platforms. Once, I posted a bug report on a Microsoft forum about an issue that seemed significant, at least to me. The only response I received was from someone in India (judging by the email time and name). The reply was so generic (like "look at these resources") that I started wondering if it was from a real person. So, my bug report did not deserve even a real person from Microsoft? This made me ask this question: what do all these 200,000+ employees at Microsoft actually do?

Here's another example: my wife joined a company that claims to have over 20,000 employees and "3 million" associates. However, their product website was poorly made, with many empty product slots. She couldn't help but wonder if all those employees really paid attention to their main website. What are all these employees doing?

Does this illustrate the issue of "missing people," i.e., the subjective perception that your surroundings should appear different from what you actually see in the real world, where you would expect significantly more activity from individuals concerned about various issues, considering the large number of "members" reported by social media websites. The world should not seem as "small" as it does according to the Internet.

If you acknowledge that there is a problem of missing people in your actual life or online activity, the solution depends on your worldview. If you are a materialist, then accept the fact that most people use the Internet for entertainment, describing restaurants, making jokes, and having online solitary sex, with little interest in what you may say in your posts. And the army of internet bots created by anonymous authors simply steer this futile activity. In this case, perhaps, Internet time-wasters online webpages are not for you. You have different goals in your life, which are much more valuable. Here's some advice: use social media platforms as "walkie-talking" gadgets for communicating with your friends and don't get too excited by many views or "followers" -they're likely just bots trying to engage you in viewing ads.

But what if this world is just a computer simulation, as some believe? If you think the problem of missing people is a byproduct of an imperfect computer simulation where unperceivable and unknowable characters are simply "dummies" or "bots" used to reduce the amount of computation, then there's not much you can do about it. You are just a game character. The only thing you can do is to bring these bots to real persons with full awareness and full spectra of detailed features by interacting with them. Obviously, unperceivable remote "dummies" have very limited activity. They are not "dressed" into full-featured personalities. Their internet presence and the ability to generate new information content is very sketchy at best.

If you adopt an idealistic perspective, then this world is shaped by the attitudes of your consciousness. Does this resolve the paradox of the "missing" active people? I believe it does. In my recent book, "The Designed World of Information: Unveiling the Incredible Realm Beyond", I noted that this world seems much smaller than expected. This observation emerged from analyzing various coincidences, which I attempted to explain using the concept of retrocausality. It suggests that the past is not fixed but changes based on the effects of our consciousness in the present. In fact, some well-known scientists believe in this effect.

However, there could be other "idealistic" explanations. What if unperceived people only "come to life" at the moment of your interaction with them? Many well-established philosophers support metaphysical solipsism, a branch of idealism, which suggests that the self is the only existing reality and that everything else, including other people, is a representation of that self, lacking independent existence. Similar to a simulated universe, other people might come into full existence only during direct interactions involving your awareness. Close your eyes and imagine a different reality where you are at the center of all that is happening, and you may change this world.

Dr. S.V.Chekanov (Find me on 𝕏.com)

The author of the book "The Designed World of Information: Unveiling the Incredible Realm Beyond'', physicist and a member of the Knowledge Standard Foundation (KSF).