The internet was created with this very basic notion that there’s a human being on the other side of the computer screen, and that notion is being replaced.

The dark forest theory of the internet elucidates the consequences of this change. It states that our online experience feels increasingly life-like but lifeless.

Public forums and online spaces are being flooded by slop, bots, trolls, clickbait, and ads. In response, people are running to walled gardens, such as private messaging groups, Discord channels, newsletters, and closed blogs, where interaction is still human.

The theory was first proposed by Yancey Strickler in 2019, two years before we were blessed with ChatGPT. That is to say, LLMs are not the root cause. The internet has simply evolved into a high-stakes environment. Careers, lives, even politics can rise or fall on clicks and likes. It’s a numbers game, and the more optimized and scaled your efforts are, the greater your chances of success.

LLMs did make this a whole lot worse, though. Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, thousands of automated pipelines have been set up that publish a relentless stream of LinkedIn hustle manifestos, Twitter rage-bait, Facebook fake news posts, and SEO-optimized corporate blog posts. With current advances in image/video gen models, even YouTube videos, TikTok clips and podcasts can all be automated at the same unprecedented scale.

The dark forest is still young and growing fast.

The Polsia Example

Meet Polsia, a solo-founder startup building an AI system that “runs” your company 24/7. It claims a $10M annual run rate and just raised $30M at a $250M valuation.

For a hundred bucks, it builds and deploys a landing page for your business, runs your social media accounts, and performs mass-scale outreach. There are almost 9000 such projects currently live.

The startup itself runs on this kind of automation. Its Twitter profile, for example, is averaging 5 tweets a MINUTE.

This is the scale of automated output that a single person can produce. It is a preview of the internet that is coming.

In fact, Polsia, spelled backward, is AI SLOP. And given their About Us page is made of adapted lyrics from Giorgio by Daft Punk (which is also running in the background if you have sound turned on), I suspect it is some kind of performative art experiment trying to show just that.

A Pinch of Data

Enough vibes, let’s put some numbers on the dark forest.

To start, since 2022, the percentage of new AI-generated internet articles has blown up from ~10% to over 50% within 24 months.

How about social media? Due to their closed nature, it is difficult to know exactly. We can nevertheless try an indirect approach and look at their reported numbers for invalid ad traffic, which show how many ad clicks come from bots. Take LinkedIn, for example:

The second claim of the dark forest theory is that people are retreating from the public internet. And the numbers agree. In the UK, an Ofcom report showed that the percentage of users who actively post fell from 61% to 49% year over year. In the US, a Morning Consult survey found that 28% reported posting less often than the previous year. Just 33% now post daily, and for Gen Z that number is even lower at 18%.

The Future: Pay, Invite, or Verify

It is likely that within the next few decades, AI generated content will account for 90% of all new content published online. The human web will be replaced with a generated web, and as a result we will become deeply skeptical of one another’s realness.

The migration to gated, non-indexable communities will continue while we hand over the public spaces to AI agents capable of navigating the noise and interacting with each other without our presence.

But leaving the public space means losing one’s voice and initiative. And it means losing access to our ever-evolving collection of knowledge and ideas. This is a big loss, and attempts will be made to protect our from voices dilution and distrust.

One way is to make scalable automation uneconomical by requiring users to pay to participate in an online platform. A one-time fee of a few dozen dollars can raise the barrier to entry without introducing a recurring burden. Of course, that means changing the current norm, where we prefer to pay with our attention and personal data. It looks impossible now, but as our relationship with the internet matures, we might find it’s in our best interest.

Another way is to implement a web of trust system, where people can vouch for each other. Such systems are prevalent today in torrenting communities. To get in, you need to be invited by a trusted member of the platform, and after you’re in, you can invite others. But your invites are noted down, and if someone you invited turns out to be a bot and gets banned, you get banned as well. You basically stake your account for other people’s legitimacy.

In the meantime, governments are salivating at the idea of making users verify themselves with a passport or biometric data. Yet a more elegant approach exists, called zero-knowledge proof, which lets you prove your humanity without giving away any part of your identity. These techniques are in development and, remarkably, are recommended by the EU. EU Regulation 2024/1183 states:

Member States should integrate different privacy-preserving technologies, such as zero knowledge proof, into the European Digital Identity Wallet. Those cryptographic methods should allow a relying party to validate whether a given statement based on the person’s identification data is true, without revealing any data on which that statement is based.

And finally, as the forest grows darker, noisier, and less human, we may simply spend less time online and more time with the people and communities around us. That doesn’t sound so bad either.

And yet, here we all are. A jury in LA recently delivered a damning verdict for Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube. It ruled these platforms are addictive, and deliberately engineered that way. This is being touted as the tobacco moment for social media, a sign that the addiction these platforms cause is being broadly recognized and punished in the courts.

A good way to think of social media addiction is as a fishing hook: you want to move away, but the bait is irresistible and the hook keeps reeling you back. What follows is my take on one of the main hooks keeping people reeled in, a non-drastic solution to limit its hold, and how to try it yourself today.

A quick refresher on how we got here

In 2012, as part of Facebook’s IPO filing, Mark Zuckerberg laid out their mission:

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.”

Social media was, in those early days, a genuinely useful tool, and it spawned one of the most profitable business models in history. But that same business model doomed it from the start, corrupting the original mission of connecting people into a mission of keeping them glued to a screen.

The logic is simple: social media sells ads. More time on the platform → more ads served → more money made. And over the years it has become clear that for these companies, the KPI of “growing engagement on consumer surfaces” is, in practice, best achieved by making users as addicted as possible.

There are many hooks companies have developed to do exactly that — infinite scroll, push notifications, streaks, etc. — but I want to focus on one specifically: the recommender system.

Recommender systems

Recommender systems are a type of algorithm that learns your behavior and preferences and surfaces items most relevant to you. They are one of the backbones of the modern internet, generating playlists on music services, recommending products on e-commerce platforms, and in the case of social media, serving you content you are most likely to engage with.

One of the key turning points in social media’s evolution was when platforms recognized they could dramatically increase engagement by mixing recommended content into feeds that were previously reserved for friends and people you follow. Zuckerberg puts it this way:

“You can think about our products as there have been two major epochs so far. The first was you had your friends and you basically shared with them and you got content from them and now, we’re in an epoch where we’ve basically layered over this whole zone of creator content. So the stuff from your friends and followers and all the people that you follow hasn’t gone away, but we added on this whole other corpus around all this content that creators have that we are recommending.”

This change shifted social media’s mission from connecting people to entertaining them. And it was a huge success — so much so that recommended content is now baked into every major platform, from LinkedIn to TikTok (TikTok especially took this to extremes, its default feed providing exclusively recommended content).

The Unhook - A Personal Example

To give a concrete example of the pull recommender systems have over your daily life, let me share a personal story.

Of all the social media platforms, YouTube was always my guilty pleasure. I spent more days than I’d like to admit going down the rabbit hole and later feeling bad about the time lost and the brain fog that followed. Then, about a year ago, my girlfriend introduced me to a wonderful button buried deep in the settings called “turn off watch history.”

Turning it off changed my homepage from this:

— to this:

And suddenly I found myself reflexively opening YouTube out of habit, only to stare at a blank page and ask myself — why did I open this?

It felt like the hook that had me reeled in had snapped with a simple click of a button. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t stop watching YouTube entirely. I’m still subscribed to channels I genuinely enjoy, but my consumption now feels intentional rather than being mindlessly driven by the algorithm. And the time returned to me is immense.

Your Turn to Slip the Hook

I was genuinely surprised YouTube even has an option to turn recommendations off. In fact, it likely exists because of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which mandates that social media platforms must allow users to opt out of personalised content feeds (I’m not sure people outside the EU have access to this at all).

Now I invite you to try this yourself. Most platforms, for obvious reasons, won’t let you turn recommendations off entirely, but you can get close. Here’s how, for each major platform, as of May 2026.

YouTube

Desktop: myactivity.google.com → Controls tab → Turn off (under YouTube History)

Mobile: Profile photo → Settings → Manage all history → Controls → Turn off

Also recommended: delete your existing watch history on the same page, or YouTube may still have enough data to serve you recommendations anyway. Note that this won’t affect the recommendations sidebar shown while watching a video. For that, the Unhook browser extension lets you hide it.

LinkedIn

Desktop: Profile icon (top right) → Settings & Privacy → General preferences → Preferred Feed View → Most recent posts

Mobile: Sliders icon (top right of feed) → Settings & Privacy → General preferences → Preferred Feed View → Most recent posts

Instagram

From here on it gets harder. Other platforms don’t offer an explicit way to turn off recommendations, so the best you can do is limit your exposure.

On Instagram, switching to a following-only feed is straightforward but doesn’t stick — you’ll need to do it each session.

Mobile: Tap the Instagram logo (top left) → select Following

Desktop: Select Following (top left)

You can also temporarily suppress recommended posts for 30 days: tap the three dots above a suggested post → Not interested → Snooze all suggested posts in feed for 30 days.

Facebook

No clean option exists here. The closest workaround is navigating to Menu → Feeds, then selecting Friends or Groups to filter out algorithmic content. For more thorough blocking, the FB Purity browser extension gives you significantly more control.

Tiktok

Option 1 — Following feed (all users): Tap Following at the top of the screen to see only content from accounts you follow, in chronological order. Like Instagram and X, this doesn’t stick — you’ll need to switch back each time you open the app.

Option 2 — Turn off personalisation entirely (EU users only): Profile → Menu (☰) → Settings and privacy → Content preferences → turn off Personalised feed. Your For You feed will then show popular content from your region and globally rather than content tailored to you.

Twitter

The Following tab is right there at the top and easy to find on both mobile and desktop. The catch is the same as others: it doesn’t remember your preference and defaults back to For You each time you open the app. You’ll need to switch manually every session.

Turn off by default

The EU’s Digital Services Act gets it half right: it gives users the right to opt out of personalized feeds. But currently platforms just bury the option and few users ever find it. The next step is to mandate that recommender systems be turned off by default for everyone, with the option to turn them on in settings and an explicit warning that doing so carries risks of addiction and mental health harm.

That default matters. It puts the burden of activation on the person who wants the feature, rather than the burden of resistance on the person who might be harmed by it. That asymmetry is small in terms of interface design and enormous in terms of real-world outcomes. We know this from seat belts, organ donation, pension enrollment: defaults are policy.

The person on the other end of that default is often already hooked, and needs every win they can get in fighting off their addiction. And this is already what we practice as a society with cigarettes, which in many countries are hidden from view in stores and must be specifically asked for. A recommendation feed should still be available to anyone who wants it. But turning it on should be a conscious choice, and should come with the same candor we demand from other producers of addictive substances: that this product is engineered to be hard to put down, and that the risks to your mental health are real.

This change, combined with similar regulation of other hooks like infinite scroll, would go a long way in fighting social media addiction. After all, making the world more open and connected doesn’t require an algorithm designed to make sure you never look away.