Profile of Turntable.fm founder's social network, Botnet, populated by adoring bots that give users an experience of being internet famous without facing trolls
Hello beautiful people! Tweets: Alexa Sonnenfeld / @alexaportia : “It's just you and the bots, who like and comment on your posts with reckless abandon.” https://www.wired.com/... @wired : Want to know how it feels to be famous on the internet? Welcome to Botnet, where the only posts you can see are your own. It's just you and the bots (hundreds of thousands of them), who like and comment on your posts with reckless abandon. https://www.wired.com/... Alyssa Bereznak / @alyssabereznak : loved this story from @pardesoteric about botnet, a new social network that simulates internet fame. it reminded me of that company (i think it was called famous for a day??) that would provide paparazzi to normal people https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Botnet arrives at a moment when the industry is split on how to fix social media's toxicity. Marc Bodnick's Telepath launch the same year bets on moderation and a 'kinder' design; Botnet instead removes other humans entirely, filling each account with hundreds of thousands of bots so the only posts visible are your own.
The idea has a lineage: back in 2018, services like Fuelgram let real people trade bot likes and comments to game Instagram's algorithm — fake engagement bolted onto a real network. Botnet inverts that, making the synthetic audience the whole product, a structure SocialAI would later commercialize with selectable bot personas.
First-order effects
- Users get the full feedback loop of internet fame — likes, comments, reach — with no trolls, harassers, or strangers in the replies, since there is no one else on the network to be cruel.
- The Turntable.fm founder's pitch positions Botnet against kindness-focused rivals like Telepath: rather than moderating human behavior, it deletes the humans.
Second-order effects
- If audiences can be fully synthetic, engagement counts stop signaling anything about real popularity — the same problem Fuelgram exposed when bought bot engagement distorted Instagram's algorithmic rewards.
- Platforms whose value rests on authentic human attention face a credibility tax: every viral moment becomes suspect once 'fame without an audience' is a downloadable product.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward social software splitting into two markets — human-to-human networks policed for authenticity, and solo feeds populated entirely by AI companions — with the line between them blurring as bot-persona apps like SocialAI go mainstream.
- Regulators and researchers who already track coordinated bot activity, as DFR Lab did after its own bot-driven harassment campaign, would need new categories for networks where the bots are the intended user base rather than an attack.
The trend: Social networking is splitting between platforms that fight synthetic engagement and products that embrace it outright, turning the audience itself into generated content.