The Grifters and the Grid

The worst people are thriving online, and the platforms are making sure it stays that way.

I just wanted to check a fact. You used to be able to do that online: search a few keywords, find a clear answer, move on. Now? It’s slop all the way down.

The first ten screens of my scroll this morning were filled with it.

Prompt engineers feed scraped articles into machines to remix other people’s styles and post them as if they were their own.

Influencers now outsource their hot takes to LLMs, scripting reactions to trends generated by other bots.

And bots argue with other bots, dragging you into a fight no humans are actually having, just so you’ll stay online a little longer.

Everywhere you look online, it’s the same duplicative, uninspiring content. The same superficial advice and recycled aesthetics, all dressed up as intellect and insight.

But this isn’t just a shift in the internet’s vibe. It’s something deeper. Something dangerous. Because the grifters aren’t just surviving online. They’re thriving at a time when longstanding businesses are folding, when small independent voices are being silenced, when creative artists are struggling.

And you’re caught in it, not because you support the grifters, but because the algorithm is designed to exploit your instincts. Every outrage-click, every doomscroll, every time you try to call out the nonsense… the system registers that as a win.

Please stop feeding the grifters.

You’ve seen the grifters. You see them all the time. Hell, you may even be following one because you aren’t yet certain your initial distrust of them was right. After all, the platforms would get rid of people spreading intentionally harmful content or outright lies, right?

Wrong.

The platforms don’t care about protecting you or the truth. It’s up to you to detect the grifters then starve them of your attention.

The provocateur is the easiest to spot. They post things like “Abolish intellectual property” or “Women weren’t oppressed, they just didn’t want jobs.” Then they sit back as the quote retweets roll in. Or, if people screenshot their stuff instead of retweeting, it creates a funnel of direct traffic when others’ followers search for them to express outrage. They know this, but you don’t.

Next comes the intentionally wrong. These people are professional time-wasters. They’ll post a blurry image of a USB stick and say, “How do I plug this into my toaster?” Or upload a 45-second video where absolutely nothing happens and title it “Wait for it 😱.” You reply to call them an idiot or how you can’t get those 45 seconds of your life back. Congrats: they just gamed the algorithm with your rage.

Then there’s the professional liar, a newer class that’s growing fast. These are your deepfake pushers, fake headline sharers, image manipulators. They’re not trying to persuade you or inform you, they just want to go viral. And they do, almost every time. Why? Because they’ve figured out the numbers game behind all the slop you see, whether it’s generated by humans or AI: Outrage is engagement. Engagement is reach. Reach is money.

And finally: the serial copycat. The most boring and the most dangerous. They never post first. They never post best. They just post more. More remixes, more summaries, more AI-generated content that feels close enough. They’re the reason your feed feels uncanny. The reason you’ve seen the same sentence five times this week. They’re not trying to stand out. They’re trying to leverage the authority someone else built, capitalize on sounding familiar, and win.

Every time you correct them, quote-tweet them, argue with them — you’re feeding the machine. And the grifters are counting on it.

Engagement means people are staying on the platform. When people stay on the platform, they see more ads. More ads makes the platform more money. The unholy agreement between the grifters and the grid is this: by keeping people on the platform, the grifters get rewarded by increased visibility. And increased visibility leads to more engagement.

The Platforms Are Complicit

It would be nice to believe this is all just a side effect. A bug in the system. Something that slipped through.

It’s not.

The platforms need the grift. The churn. The AI Slop.

See, the platforms don’t want creators, they want content. Cheap, infinite, fast content preferably made by people who don’t ask questions and don’t expect to get paid.

Enter AI.

Now the grifters can pump out a hundred pieces of “content” a day. Fake tweets. Fake art. Fake outrage. Even the “fresh” stuff is fake — there’s a whole cottage industry selling $87 courses on how to turn top replies into Instagram quote memes. (That tip’s free. You’re welcome.)

AI wasn’t built to improve quality. It was built to grow systems. More content, more often, more predictably. But that kind of scale doesn’t elevate anything, it flattens everything.

And the platforms prefer it that way.

Because when everything sounds the same, the algorithm can confidently reward consensus and bury anything it deems statistically unlikely. And what’s more unlikely than original thought, personal insight, and individual talent?

We’ve arrived at a feed full of bait, bots, and barely-human content — where the worst people get rewarded for the worst behavior. And a creeping sense that maybe the grifters didn’t just hijack the system… maybe the system was built for them.

Here’s where the collapse of trust is leading us

It starts small.

You skip a news story because it might be fake. You decide that an actual writer using an em dash (which has been in use since Ancient Greece) is AI so you ignore them. You side-eye a video that looks... off. You start reverse image searching everything.

You’re not paranoid. You’re just online.

And somewhere along the way, a weird thing happens: you stop trusting your own eyes. Not because you’re gullible, but because you’re exhausted. Every piece of content is a little test. Is it AI? Is it bait? Is it real?

Is the time spent online even worth it anymore?

But maybe that’s the point: Make everything so fake, so flattened, so exhausting that you stop trying to care.

Meanwhile, real artists — the people making things with actual skill and soul — are getting crushed. Not by better talent. By faster noise. Their work gets buried under clones, scraped to train the same models that will replace them, and penalized by algorithms for not being “engaging” enough. (Translation: not wrong enough, fast enough, or fake enough to anger you into reacting)

And it’s not just art. It’s not just creators. It’s everything.

News is suspect. Screenshots are suspect. Video evidence is suspect. Institutions built on truth are now running on vibes. Facts don’t matter. Feelings do, especially if they’re algorithmically optimized.

Even our relationships take a hit. If people can fake faces, voices, whole conversations... how do you know who to believe? What about your friend who falls for every fake and wastes your time sending them to you or tagging you in the comments? How long before you let that relationship wind down, before you mute them then unfriend them then outright block them?

Here’s how we stop the insanity

If you want a better internet — one where truth survives and creativity still matters — stop feeding the grifters.

Don’t just ignore what you hate. Actively reward what you love. The algorithm is watching, whether you like it or not. Teach it to value something real.

Stop giving your attention to things that fill you with rage. Give it to the things you want to see more of in the world.

Yes, it’s very much the opposite of what we were taught to do as kids. Now, instead of standing up to the bully, calling out the liars or shouting in the comments that the Emperor has no clothes, you need to starve them of attention. Ignore them. Deprive them of your time and spend it supporting what you want to see in this world.

Deny the grifters your attention, and you cut off their supply. Reward what you value, and the system will follow. (Pay attention, Millennials: that’s your law of attraction at work. Gen Z, that’s how you script it into existence.)

But if you don’t?

Then the grifters win. The platforms profit. And the rest of us are left drowning in crap.