Everyone You Meet Online is a Freak

An internet for the obsessives, by the obsessives

Something curious happened in the /r/LiveStreamFail community last week.

The subreddit, which is dedicated to chronicling the ups and downs of prominent live streamers, had a post alleging that the livestreamer ExtraEmily was viewbotting. Viewbots are tools that create an army of fake accounts to make a stream look like it’s more popular than it actually is. They’re against the terms of service of every major streaming platform, but are often used by large streamers nonetheless. Appearing popular is the first step towards actually being popular, so when evidence emerges that a streamer is using viewbots it’s a big deal.

In this case, ExtraEmily appeared to accidentally show a window on her PC with the ‘ViewBot.ai’ URL running in the background. But the original post on the topic, despite being quite popular and not breaking any rules, was taken down by a moderator. Users tried posting it again, only for the new posts to be taken down as well. In the end, a post was finally allowed, but users were incredibly suspicious of why the moderator team had intervened in the first place. Some users formed conspiracy theories that the moderation team was filled with ExtraEmily fans who wanted to protect her image.

In this case, the conspiracists were correct. Days after the incident, the mod team for /r/LiveStreamFail put out a statement saying that a single moderator was responsible for the drama, and had essentially tried a cover up to protect a streamer he liked:

Today, it started to become more apparent that this moderator may have lied, or fabricated the claim of a pop-up, to seemingly protect ExtraEmily. Through more digging, we were able to confirm that they are an avid Extra Emily clipper, poster and a very active member of her community and Discord… we have decided to remove this mod from the team.

On the surface, that’s where the story ends. Reddit moderators are power-tripping fools obsessed with niche bullshit? Quelle surprise! But I think it’s worth digging in a bit further. The moderator in question wasn’t just a ‘fan’ of ExtraEmily. They are a superfan. They are an obsessive fan, a no-lifer, a fanatic, to return to the literal and original meaning of the word. ExtraEmily has streamed for 57 total hours so far in the month of April. The moderator in question commented in her livestream chat more than seven thousand, four hundred times this month. That works out to a rate of two comments per minute, every single minute that ExtraEmily streams, which looks something like this:

Those 7K+ chat messages don’t include the time this individual spent in ExtraEmily’s Discord channel, the time they spent posting about her on Reddit, or the time they spend clipping her stream into short videos for other platforms. This person is essentially working a frenetically paced full-time job just to be the #1 ExtraEmily fan. It’s almost certainly why they sought a position as a moderator on /r/LiveStreamFail - to be able to influence conversations about her.

The important thing to realize, as you look at the astonishing amount of parasociality that some people are capable of, is that this is not really all that unusual. Most of the people you meet online are freaks.

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It’s no secret that Reddit moderators tend to be extremely weird, antisocial losers.¹ Whether it’s the autistic non-binary part-time dog walker who went on Fox News to complain that work is slavery, or the former head moderator of LiveStreamFail who recorded perhaps the most cringe open letter in human history, Reddit’s history is filled with moderators embarrassing themselves. But Reddit isn’t an exception here. Every part of the internet is dominated by this kind of person.

On Wikipedia, the top 5,000 editors are responsible for about one third of all edits on the site:

5,000 represents 0.01% of all Wikipedia editors - that’s not one percent, it’s one hundredth of one percent. The same pattern emerges even if you attempt to control for edit quality (PWV here is a type of quality-adjusted edit count):

At the end of this period, the top 10% of editors (by edit count) were credited with 86% of PWVs, the top 1% about 70%, and the top 0.1% (4200 users) were attributed 44% of PWVs, i.e. nearly half of Wikipedia's "value" as measured in this study.

There are individual editors with millions of edits, who have been on the site for twenty years and who post edits at a rate approaching one-per-minute for the last twenty years straight.

Another example: Last year I got into a little tiff with tech influencer and reporter Taylor Lorenz. I suggested that Lorenz ultimately wants to be an influencer, after which she accused me of calling her an attention whore and being a misogynist. I did not and would not call Lorenz an attention whore, because that would be a very mean-spirited thing to do. But I did note that Lorenz, in the same week that she denied wanting to be an influencer, posted 433 times just on the X platform. Assuming she sleeps 7 hours a night, that’s a post every eight minutes she’s awake, seven days a week.

And that’s just on X - she’s also highly active on BlueSky and Threads, where she likely had hundreds of additional posts. That week she had also posted four YouTube videos (each around a half an hour in length), several podcasts, several multi-thousand word articles, numerous TikToks, Instagram Reels, and more. She’s remarkably prolific and I, quite frankly, admire her work ethic. I wish that I worked a fraction as hard as she does. But just like the Reddit mod or Wikipedia editors above, she’s a freak when it comes to online behavior. She is insanely online. She did an interview with Wired recently where she admitted her screen time was nearly 17 hours per day, and said “Listen, if I could put the screen inside my brain, I would”.

There are more stories like this than I have time to recount. The top 1% of OnlyFans creators take over a third of all revenue on the site. On Polymarket, the top 0.23% of wallets account for 63% of total trading volume. 98% of Reddit users never comment or post at all. This rule applies to places you’d never believe, including jihadi forums:

The Mujahedon forum first appeared on 5 October 2005 and has grown steadily. As of 1 June 2006, 1039 members were listed, with some 22,307 posts between them. An analysis of user activity reveals that the vast majority (87%) have never posted on the forums: they are passive or casual users; 13 percent have posted at least once; 5 percent 50 or more times; 1 percent 500 or more times. A small but vocal, active core posts new content, initiates debates and responds to questions posed by newcomers.

Everywhere you go online, the people you’re most likely to interact with are not normal people. They’re people who are so freakishly online you’d struggle to believe they’re real.

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As crazy as some of these statistics are, I worry they actually undersell how deep this pattern is built into our online communities. Much of what we’re talking about can be explained by the 90-9-1 rule of online communities - no matter where you are, 90% of users lurk and never post, 9% of users may comment or post infrequently, and 1% are the true creators, those actually creating original content or commenting voraciously.

But the consequences of the 90-9-1 rule are amplified by algorithmic platforms. Imagine a stylized platform with users who contribute according to a rough 90-9-1 rule, where 90% of users post once a month, 9% of users post ten times a month, and 1% of users post a ninety times a month. Theoretically, you’re equally likely to run into a post from any of the groups, because (0.9 * 1 = 0.09 * 10 = 0.01 * 90). But in reality, the 1% heaviest users almost certainly have larger followings on the platform and get large advantages in the platform’s algorithm for being such frequent contributors. They’re likely mini-celebrities. Their 90 posts a month all reach a large audience, while the 90% posting once a month are shouting into the void.

These kinds of super users also tend to seek out other ways to influence discourse. They volunteer as Reddit moderators to make sure their favorite streamer isn’t criticized. They post not just on one site, but on many. They’re in the Discords and group chats, strategizing with other superfans on how to best crush alternative points of view. This is what they’ve chosen to do with their life, and by god they’re not going to miss a chance to let you hear about it.

Let’s say you’re a casual fan of a TV show like The Pitt, and you want to see what people are saying online about it. You aren’t going to end up seeing posts from other casual fans like yourself. You’re going to end up seeing the posts from a guy who has posted more than eight hundred irate messages in the last week about how the show runners are evil for having a bias against Dr. Samira Mohan.

The same dynamic applies everywhere. Want to chat about a livestreamer? The comment section you’re in is likely filled with either the streamer’s superfans or super-haters. Want to debate some edits to a Wikipedia article? The guy debating you has probably spent a decade memorizing how to wield Wikipedia’s complex internal rules to crush your idea. Editors like him don’t just make the most edits, they also create the rules of the game. Want to make a bet on a prediction market? The other side of that bet isn’t another random amateur like you. It’s a guy who bets on prediction markets for a living and is more than happy to win a new sucker’s money.

The internet is run by and for freaks and insane people. These are individuals who have devoted so much time to such incredibly niche topics that only God himself could possibly fathom why they do it. There are times when this is amusing, like when GeoGuessr pro Rainbolt has every rock in the world memorized. There are times when it’s helpful, like when you have an odd question about which brand of baking soda works best in carrot cake and someone in /r/Baking has already put together a spreadsheet testing twenty different brands. But there are also times when the freaks online drive the rest of us to ruin. Fandoms are becoming ever more obsessive and ever more deranged. Political discussions are dominated by extremists and lunatics. And the freaks are driving out the rest of us who simply don’t have the time to keep up with them.

1. To my eternal shame, I am still a moderator for several large subreddits.