I hid a link on my website that only bots can see and told them not to follow it. They broke the rules and in 4 days they went 124,414 levels deep into an endless maze. One bot opened 782,580 doors.…

6 days ago by time2lose to c/interestingasfuck

Full title: I hid a link on my website that only bots can see and told them not to follow it. They broke the rules and in 4 days they went 124,414 levels deep into an endless maze. One bot opened 782,580 doors. I thought this was super interesting, this is how the internet is these days. Thought I’d share.

eurodyne 147 points 6 days ago

Designing impossible mazes for AI to get lost in as a matter of civil defense? What a fucking world we live in…

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Steve 23 points 6 days ago

🔥 this is fine

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wonderingwanderer 18 points 6 days ago

There's a few open source programs out there for doing precisely this. Iocaine, Nepenthes, and Book of Infinity are the three I know of. There may be more

path: 0 26194904 26202039, hotness: undefined, score: 18, children: 0
Apeman42 5 points 5 days ago

We're probably about a decade away from the Blackwall, choom. (2 according to the sourcebooks, but I think Pondsmith may have been a little optimistic.)

path: 0 26194904 26220486, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1
Saledovil 1 point 5 days ago

Cyberspace ain't a space, choom.

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Th4tGuyII 132 points 6 days ago

Man do I hate the age we live in now, where people are actively having to declare war on scrapers like this because AI bros have literally zero respect towards the rest of the internet.

I just hope all that endless maze scraping cost some asshat a decent chunk of money.

path: 0 26195295, hotness: undefined, score: 132, children: 6
SarahValentine 103 points 6 days ago

Right! This isn't "AI going rogue", it's software agents made and employed by perfectly human psychopaths, doing what they were made to do.

path: 0 26195295 26195319, hotness: undefined, score: 103, children: 0
OwOarchist 19 points 6 days ago

I just hope all that endless maze scraping cost some asshat a decent chunk of money.

Unfortunately, it probably cost the maze's owner nearly as much, due to all the traffic.

path: 0 26195295 26196582, hotness: undefined, score: 19, children: 4
HerbGrower 10 points 6 days ago

What if instead of trying to cost them directly with crawling, you made what they crawl worthless? Could somewhat ironically use an LLM to generate gibberish output for them to feed on. Or a bash script can do it too.

path: 0 26195295 26196582 26198925, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 2
solxix 21 points 6 days ago path: 0 26195295 26196582 26198925 26199904, hotness: undefined, score: 21, children: 0
Saledovil 4 points 5 days ago

They use Markov chains to generate the text. Which makes the data actively harmful to train on.

path: 0 26195295 26196582 26198925 26223416, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
RockBottom 3 points 6 days ago

I’m afraid to ask about the energy footprint. But what the heck, what do we know about it?

path: 0 26195295 26196582 26205815, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
LeighWeighTacoma 68 points 6 days ago

Is ironic the word for OP being a repost bot? Or is it just expected at this point?

path: 0 26197643, hotness: undefined, score: 68, children: 38
kurt_vonnegut2 8 points 6 days ago

How do you know? Just curious.

path: 0 26197643 26198493, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 37
LeighWeighTacoma 47 points 6 days ago

Post history and seeing the same username every day. Plus they rarely every respond to questions and comments when they post and what they respond with is generic.

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Goodeye8 13 points 6 days ago

Maybe it's the bot of the guy who thought the only way to save the threadiverse is by having bots repost almost everything from Reddit.

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26198544 26199194, hotness: undefined, score: 13, children: 0
r0ertel 6 points 6 days ago

What's the purpose of doing this as a bot but not declaring the account as a bot account? On other sites, they do it for karma farming, but that doesn't really apply here, right?

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cantstopthesignal 14 points 6 days ago

Probably just another layer of analytics for engagement bait in other spaces. They can also copy top comments and train LLMs and whatever else every bad actor does to every internet comment site now. They are like a slime mold and grow toward any source of nutrition except it's an n-dimensional maze and the nutrition is influencing public opinion and scamming people.

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26198544 26201521 26202096, hotness: undefined, score: 14, children: 0
bold_atlas 1 point 5 days ago
path: 0 26197643 26198493 26198544 26201521 26223620, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
UltraGiGaGigantic 5 points 6 days ago

Shit, sounds like me.

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26198544 26204754, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1
BilboBargains 3 points 5 days ago

Basic bitch detected

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26198544 26204754 26210901, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
LovableSidekick -4 points 6 days ago

In other words, you don't really know - not that there's anything wrong with that. Opinions and "it's obvious" are the social media standard for "fact".

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scytale 10 points 6 days ago

That user has a history of reposting reddit content and the format and pattern of posts are obviously not human. All of its posts are originally from reddit. A simple search of its posts will show you they are copied word for word from an older reddit post. What more evidence do you need?

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26198544 26199739 26201371, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 1
LeighWeighTacoma 5 points 6 days ago

I prefer to think of it as being observant and investigating but to each their own. OP has been called out on almost every post and never defended themselves. Could be a human who doesn't check the replies but either way, the behavior is the same.

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26198544 26199739 26199826, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0
Mulligrubs -10 points 6 days ago

If you see the same username every day, that means you are on every day.... only a spy would do that.

Suspected Chinese agent, possibly Russian

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26198544 26202992, hotness: undefined, score: -10, children: 2
LeighWeighTacoma 4 points 5 days ago

Yeah I don't know a single person who gets on the internet every day. I'm so uNiQuE and special!

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time2lose -16 points 6 days ago

Nah those people complaining are reddit agents. Trying to ruin lemmy

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phailhaus 16 points 6 days ago path: 0 26197643 26198493 26201578 26204223, hotness: undefined, score: 16, children: 10
time2lose -2 points 5 days ago

Meh. Ya welcome for content.

Accusing people of spamming when they given you content is an indication of a reddit agent that intentionally conflate those ideas with spam.

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26201578 26204223 26212372, hotness: undefined, score: -2, children: 9
LeighWeighTacoma 16 points 6 days ago

lol not even a little. I'm trying to grow my lemmy communities. I have no problem with it being a bot, that's why I haven't blocked it. My issue is that it's not declared as a bot. Several times I've found myself asking further questions to just realize, it's that same guy who posted a "my super cool thing" five minutes ago and I won't get a response to my question. There's no way he has a jurrasic park themed turtle sanctuary in addition to the other 50 sweet things in his house/yard/town/

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Fmstrat 5 points 5 days ago

There's plenty of documented evidence of alt bots from moderators. Also, the lack of source link is a key factor in why people are interpreting your post that way.

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CorrectAlias 4 points 6 days ago

As I told you on your other account, you are the one bringing reddit into the threadiverse.

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26201578 26206597, hotness: undefined, score: 4, children: 0
greatwhitebuffalo41 3 points 5 days ago

People might believe you if you provided the source or responded to anything other than to argue and dip

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26201578 26217595, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 6
time2lose -3 points 5 days ago

Look at what they do there's absolutely nobody posting on lemmy and they're trying to ban the only active contributor.

who this is benefit clearly reddit.

They are not just complainers, they are provocateurs attempting to decontent free and open platforms

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26201578 26217595 26217745, hotness: undefined, score: -3, children: 5
UltraGiGaGigantic 3 points 6 days ago

We can ruin our own instances thank you very much.

path: 0 26197643 26198493 26201578 26204780, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
IrateAnteater 59 points 6 days ago

You know, I wonder if the AI agents are willing to open random zip files they find on websites, and I'm further curious if they're smart enough to avoid a zip bomb.

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perviouslyiner 39 points 6 days ago

Can follow JWZ for practical experience on this kind of thing - apparently it is getting so bad that even opening a connection to deliver the zip bombs is getting infeasible now.

path: 0 26195176 26195900, hotness: undefined, score: 39, children: 0
Beangut 6 points 6 days ago

You can serve zip bombs as web pages since most crawlers support gzip encoding.

And yes it's very effective ;)

path: 0 26195176 26205322, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0
lividweasel 43 points 6 days ago

No, you didn’t.

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LeighWeighTacoma 41 points 6 days ago

Yeah I have OP listed as "repost bot" so if I see something cool I can go check somewhere else for the info.

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kurt_vonnegut2 4 points 6 days ago

How do you know?

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Ludicrous0251 24 points 6 days ago

Look at their profile. 460 posts, 45 comments, in just 1 month. If they aren't automating their posts they need to go touch grass.

An overwhelming number of their posts have titles like "I made this thing", but are clearly just popular posts ripped straight from Reddit.

I also have them tagged as a repost bot. I'm not blocking them, but don't bother trying to engage like the content is somehow organic or original.

path: 0 26197037 26197633 26198501 26199635, hotness: undefined, score: 24, children: 4
LeighWeighTacoma 9 points 6 days ago

Yeah, that's my issue. Like some stuff is cool, I want to ask follow up questions. But OP didn't make or create any of the things they're posting so they'll never know the answer. Which is fine, if you link to the original source. I understand that sometimes you can't link the original source but like, be upfront. I repost things from reddit in !bestofinternetupdates@lemmy.world. But I do it by hand and I link back to the original locations in case people want more information or to see the original source.

path: 0 26197037 26197633 26198501 26199635 26201863, hotness: undefined, score: 9, children: 0
kurt_vonnegut2 3 points 6 days ago

Ah ok, thanks. How do you tag users?

path: 0 26197037 26197633 26198501 26199635 26205518, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 2
atomicbocks 5 points 6 days ago

You can find the original post on Reddit, somebody has already linked the original post down the thread. This is typical of this user and a few others like sanitation who have become notorious for using Reddit repost bots many times with errors in the repost like not having all of the image or not having any of the post body.

It’s very annoying.

path: 0 26197037 26197633 26198501 26199517, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 0
myavatar 3 points 6 days ago

Also interested in how you know. Just commenting to get notificated (:

path: 0 26197037 26197633 26198501 26198861, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 3
phailhaus 8 points 6 days ago

Post quantities are a big indicator. A stronger indicator in this case is that their only comment on this post is accusing people of being "Reddit Agents". That points to a specific spambot operator with multiple alts that refuses to declare any of them as bots. They had a malfunction two weeks ago that left their LLM prompt in a post.

path: 0 26197037 26197633 26198501 26198861 26204315, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 2
tigermountain 3 points 6 days ago

What is this? It's really freaking me out.

path: 0 26197037 26202520, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
myyass 33 points 6 days ago

So what you're implying is this should be implemented in every website in both follow/not follow just to waste their money?

[Everyone liked this.]

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mofongo 4 points 5 days ago

I wonder if it's possible to trap bots like this and use them to mine crypto.

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myyass 2 points 5 days ago

I'm sure it might be possible but whoever would be doing this wouldn't let their secret out.

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Saledovil 2 points 5 days ago

It's not. The bot just gets a copy of the website, looks for links, and then sends a request to the server to get those subdomains. Highly unlikely that there is a vulnerability that let's you execute arbitrary code, which would be what you'd need to mine crypto.

path: 0 26202322 26220514 26223320, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1
Trigger2_2000 1 point 4 days ago

Quick everyone, to AI for a "solution" /s.

path: 0 26202322 26220514 26223320 26237750, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
als 20 points 5 days ago

Iocane is software designed to do this

path: 0 26206839, hotness: undefined, score: 20, children: 0
LovableSidekick 18 points 6 days ago

Apparently some bot programmers are assholes who ignore rel="nofollow".

path: 0 26199696, hotness: undefined, score: 18, children: 1
cantstopthesignal 24 points 6 days ago

robots.txt only keeps the honest robots out

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OneOfManyPerfectCats 17 points 6 days ago

Can anyone explain what is happening behind the scenes with the "room creation"?? That sounds intriguing. I understand OP is a bot but, is anything described here an actual way of trapping crawlers? How are the crawlers fooled by any of this?

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HansGruber 30 points 6 days ago

He placed an invisible link on his website. Only visible by reading the page content (html). Then the bots followed the link. This link lead to a page with 5 links (door) four links are dead and one leads to another page (level) with again 5 links.

I guess the links and pages are generated on the go. So the bots and crawlers may follow the links forever of they like.

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OneOfManyPerfectCats 1 point 3 days ago

I wonder if pages have to be generated individually to appear legit to the crawlers, or if the same contents can be served as different links over and over... if I knew more about how this stuff works I'd try it myself hah.

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algernon 1 point 19 hours ago

Most crawlers don't care - they're purely downloading. Most garbage will also be filtered out before training, and generating plausible garbage is expensive - not really worth the trouble. What you can do with the garbage, is that you can place unique identifiers in the links you serve, so when a crawler that you can't recognize otherwise comes visiting a poisoned URL, you can firewall it off. This works because the crawlers use a queue: they get a list of URLs to visit, they download them, and later on, the URLs from those get extracted, and crawlers will visit those URLs.

So if you manage to trap a bot, and overwhelm its queue with poisoned URLs, you can also catch bots that you wouldn't be able to easily identify otherwise. And that is why serving an endless maze of garbage is so very useful. Because it lets you catch stuff like headless chromes operating through residential proxies: because those too, follow a queue.

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HansGruber 1 point 2 days ago

As some other users have already mentioned it, have a look at this project anyway: https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/

It gives much more bloated information for a crawler than I expected. But sounds quite fun to host.

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SCmSTR 17 points 6 days ago

Is it possible to have the bots recursively give themselves instructions and birth child instances of themselves that do the same thing? Because if it's ai bots, that could absolutely be maliciously exploited.

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HootinNHollerin 16 points 6 days ago

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Bipauler 11 points 6 days ago

Throw in a few of them torture chambers and make it a proper dungeon >:)

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nightwatch_admin 5 points 6 days ago path: 0 26195437 26197714, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1
Bipauler 1 point 6 days ago

Yeah but I thought maybe we could add it from the repo somehow so if the bot got extra lost going through doors it wasn't supposed to look behind, that it got in trouble and got a spanking

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CombatWombat 11 points 6 days ago

It's ironic that you advertise yourself as having "time to lose" but you don't have "time to replace 1st person pronouns with more accurate 3rd person ones."

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TrackenDaKracken 11 points 6 days ago

"You" did no such thing.

Account blocked. Bot, or not.

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OneOfManyPerfectCats 2 points 6 days ago
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Agent641 10 points 5 days ago

Need a digital Minotaur in these labyrinths

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Impractical_Island 9 points 5 days ago

This was a fun story. I masturbated. I did not finish, nor did I enjoy myself. At the same time, I have procured a thought sapling about slime molds, specifically how a specialized biological system could outperform a binary computer. This triggers a thought about quantum computing being better at logistics but shit at counting, for example. Information density directly correlates with the degree of topological entanglement, which means the möbiation of entanglement is itself the mechanism to not just encode additional density of information, but this information encoded can be parsed differently by different systems, to thus allow a multivariable set of instructions to exist in the same space. Thank you, I will take my Nobel Prize as a suppository.

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fyzzlefry 3 points 5 days ago

Big if true

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Impractical_Island 2 points 5 days ago

Oh, I definitely masturbated, that's always a "given" in my axiomatic habberdance. That's the word my brain did done conjure just now thakely.

path: 0 26220014 26221965 26222120, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
mildseason 7 points 6 days ago

Extremely good content! Very interesting. Would love to see more!

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cannedtuna 22 points 6 days ago

Can’t see the other comment replies to you for some reason, but the irony is that the OP you’re replying to is a bot that scrapes Reddit for content with a vibe coded extension.

Here’s the original post in /r/interestingasfuck that was removed by mods for some reason.

https://www.reddit.com/...

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mildseason 4 points 6 days ago

I don't know what's real anymore!!

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MousePotatoDoesStuff 2 points 6 days ago

I guess the bot preserved the post, then?

Still, would be better if the original was properly credited...

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cannedtuna 6 points 6 days ago

Yeah I guess that’s the upside. Honestly I would have no problem with what he’s doing if he changed a couple things.

If his accounts (he’s got a bunch) were clearly marked as bots, but I’m sure he doesn’t want to because then you’ll see how much bot generated content he moves over. But like there’s already RSS feed type bots that repost content from Reddit and even include a link back to the original. Not that I’d want to push people over there, but you’re not getting actual comment engagement on a bot post.

If he just changed the titles so he’s not constantly posting “I did x” content when no he didn’t. “I did x” posts like this or HistoryMeme type posts spark conversation that will end up being one sided because you’ll never get a reply from the bot.

Posted a little fucking less. Look on the front page and see how many posts are coming from Sanitation, Time2Loose, Mustachious_Grumpus, Grumpus_Maximus, OldManAlex, and others he has. All Reddit repost bot accounts. It’s just inorganic. Same reason people hate that shit on Reddit.

Edit: apparently he’s already doing that as well under the username liquorice which IS marked as a bot using the same vibe coded extension. Only then he goes and makes 8+ other account not marked as bots to cover up how much bot posted shit is being pulled over from Reddit.

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MousePotatoDoesStuff 1 point 6 days ago

Do the RSS feed bots also repost comments? Because I think something like that would be nice to have (kinda like bridging Discord to Stoat), just preferably implemented by instance runners and marked and credited accordingly.

path: 0 26195520 26196987 26199276 26199547 26204622, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 2
SatansMaggotyCumFart 10 points 6 days ago

It's a bot reposting content from reddit.

path: 0 26195520 26196720, hotness: undefined, score: 10, children: 2
mildseason 5 points 6 days ago

Fuck really? :'(

path: 0 26195520 26196720 26196790, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 1
rimu 3 points 6 days ago path: 0 26195520 26196720 26196790 26199310, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 0
MantisToboggon 7 points 6 days ago

Is this why porn is so good now?

path: 0 26194835, hotness: undefined, score: 7, children: 7
Psythik 2 points 6 days ago

Where are you getting your porn from, 'cause between ID-checking roadblocks and the fact that no can seem to make a decent search engine anymore, I've never had a more difficult time trying to find good porn. Please, share with me your secrets (and no, I am never going to give my ID to a porn site!)

path: 0 26194835 26200176, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 6
MantisToboggon 0 points 6 days ago

Yandex.

path: 0 26194835 26200176 26200531, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 5
Psythik 0 points 6 days ago

Isn't Yandex a Russian search engine? I meant a porntube site. That way I can create an account and have a recommendation algorithm.

path: 0 26194835 26200176 26200531 26201069, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 4
MantisToboggon 2 points 6 days ago

You need an account to jerk off?

path: 0 26194835 26200176 26200531 26201069 26201116, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 3
dontgogettingtooclever 6 points 6 days ago

can you turn this into a WP plug-in?

please?

edit: I see now that this is a repost bot agcount. But hey, maybe someone else can design a plugin.

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overcast5348 3 points 6 days ago

Look up "tarpit" plug ins, most of this is ready to use. I see quite a few when I search, but I'm not familiar with the wordpress world, so can't really recommend one or the other.

path: 0 26198468 26200469, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 1
dontgogettingtooclever 1 point 5 days ago

I appreciate the lead. Thank you

path: 0 26198468 26200469 26211569, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
Treczoks 2 points 6 days ago

Thank you for your service!

path: 0 26204905, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 0
omghi 1 point 6 days ago
path: 0 26199408, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
Axolotl_cpp 0 points 5 days ago

You hid the link? Really?

path: 0 26211819, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 0
master_baiter 0 points 5 days ago

Ironic how this infographic is AI-generated.

path: 0 26220210, hotness: undefined, score: 0, children: 2
thermal_shock 2 points 5 days ago

How do you know this?

path: 0 26220210 26222499, hotness: undefined, score: 2, children: 1
master_baiter 1 point 4 days ago

Claude has a very recognizable style of web design and graphics it creates.

It also loves to spam tiny little explanations in certain places with punchy, short sentences. ("Deepest room reached, per bot name. Bots: 1,029,000 requests. Humans: 193,000 page views.", "412,057 of them in a single day. They never found a button, because there isn't one.")

https://op.tngl.io/every-fucking-website/ does this look familiar?

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