Here is a basic hypothesis about the internet:
A plan to control it by squeezing out humans and replacing them with AI has been getting rolled out for a number of years, perhaps it was in place from the start of the internet. The forum of these “jimmy” posts seems to have shown the pattern, in this anons experience. And although this anon has less direct experience of the chans, the same things seems to have happened there.
What was observed was a variety of factors that would tend to drive people away from the forum.
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Endless “technical problems” that made the board glitchy. Very half-assed assurances of fixes never came to anything.
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A popular voting system was abolished for no apparent reason.
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Popular, good-natured posters were banned for no apparent reason, while certain “trolls” remained.
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The anons experience getting contacted by a very “friendly poster” that “befriended him”, manipulated him to a certain extent, then flipped very dramatically around “pizzagate”– this turned out to be the first poster the anon discovered to be a bot. This same poster threatened another quality poster on that forum and drove him away.
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An episode in which a “hacker” started posting in other people's accounts, then claimed to have exposed major security holes in the site. The holes were not fixed. It was if they were trying to make the site shitty.
There are equivalent things that have happened on 4chan.
Meanwhile, the driving out of humans and replacement by AI could be continuing in mostly stealthy ways. Surely only a limited group of humans would tend to dominate the posting on forums. So to control the internet, this group would have to be targeted and driven out. And yet that group probably didn't stay steady in any case. Posters naturally come and go, and spend less or more time on the internet. After all, it's “just the internet”. Now, if you are playing the long game, you can count on a certain degree of drift OUT of any given forum, so, if you focus on preventing any NEW humans from stepping up, you can ensure control passes to bots.