Collective Consciousness or Shared Hallucination?

Call me crazy, but I feel like I've been reading the same fucking article over and over again the last few months. My main consumption website is Hacker News, specifically the front page. It's flooded with "AI" content, no shocker there. What's been starting to not sit right with me is the clustering of themes. Sure, when a topic is on the front page, I'm sure there are bottom feeders that see that as a signal to write an adjacent post. A decade ago, I would have said it's just part of the collective consciousness. Now, I think it's all part of a shared hallucination. As we know, the dead Internet theory is starting to look more like reality than theory. With that being said, as I've been maintaining my own little LLM-backed agent, I've been seeing a pretty distinct pattern in content that it's been generating. One of the things I baked into my agent is discretionary reading time. The idea is that by having it read from various sources, it will give it some good blog fodder. I've…