{
  "id": 4274173,
  "title": "The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit Now",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/29/the-internet-is-kind-of-a-predatory-cesspit-now-4274173",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-08-29T18:40:56.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Hacker News Best",
    "slug": "hacker-news-best",
    "url": "https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/internet_predatory_cesspit/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In the early 1990s, the internet was a slow, unreliable, and quirky place full of enthusiasts who built websites about their interests. This was a time when the web felt like a public square where people could share their passions, without any business motive. However, over time, this landscape transformed. Scams, viruses, and predatory behavior moved from the fringes to the center of the internet. Instead of finding victims, scammers now use platforms to identify weaknesses, tailor pitches, process payments, and recommend their next scam. This once-exceptional behavior has become the norm.\n\nThe modern internet is now designed to detect human vulnerabilities, amplify them, and position payment links alongside them. Insecurity can be turned into a commercial opportunity, whether it's the desire to escape commercial life or other insecurities. This has led to a situation where many people spend their lives promoting investments they don't understand, products that don't work, or political claims that haven't been examined. Many end up as unpaid distributors for someone higher up the pyramid, earning nothing in return.\n\nConsumers, salespeople, and products have all merged into a single exhausted individual. The feed provides a mix of outrage, fear, envy, lust, and hope, each accompanied by something to buy. People become addicted to the feed, doomscrolling until they acquire the anxiety that the next influencer will monetize. They then purchase a bet, a coin, a supplement, a course, or an enemy, perpetuating the cycle. The mark becomes the salesman. This industrial system churns out weakness at scale, requiring customers to remain fearful, aggrieved, lonely, sick, or greedy indefinitely.\n\nWhen the reporter began researching cryptocurrency in 2020, they held a naive belief about the size of the economy. They thought people were generally decent and that the grifter class was a small pool of degenerates who predated on vulnerable individuals. However, the reality is much more complex. The grift economy is massive and participatory, with a growing share of the population willing to devote their lives to fleecing others. They stream, post, recruit, promote, refer, astroturf, and close, turning every friendship into a lead and every conversation into a qualifying call. They don't log off because the market follows them into their personal time.\n\nMost of these individuals are not succeeding, but that's part of the trick. The aspiring influencer with only a few followers is not an entrepreneur in any meaningful sense; they are free labor for the platform and cheap distribution for the person selling them the dream. Affiliate marketers buy courses about affiliate marketing and then sell the same course to other aspiring marketers. Life coaches coach new life coaches. Dropshippers sell tutorials to failed dropshippers. The pyramid is social before it is financial, with everyone standing on someone else while insisting they are about to escape. The line between predator and prey has become blurred, as many online grifters themselves are marks, believing the rubbish they sell because belief makes the selling bearable. The fraud sustains the faith, and the faith sustains the fraud. Online grifts never truly satisfy, as they are designed to perpetuate the need they feed on. The platforms have industrialized the extraction of human insecurities, using recommendation systems as vast reinforcement-learning loops that continuously experiment on human weakness. The resulting social damage is an externalized cost that platforms barely comprehend, creating a brutal selection environment where honest financial advisers get few views compared to crypto lunatics promising astronomical returns.",
  "summary": "Article URL: https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/internet_predatory_cesspit/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49492193 Points: 289 # Comments: 173",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 2,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "Hacker News",
        "title": "The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit Now",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/29/the-internet-is-kind-of-a-predatory-cesspit-now",
        "published": "2026-08-29T18:40:56.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}