...THE BEAST LIVES...
They started creating the beast in the 90's. People with thousands of IRC bots would show off in little known IRC channels, connecting thousands of hijacked computers all at once and spamming the server until it went down.
They are still out there. Eventually the people running the botnets figured out they could sell use of the botnet for millions, and they went into the shadows.
A dark world exists that no one talks about... and... I might be killed for saying this but everything we see on the internet is now curated by some unknown force (or forces) using approximately 1 million sophisticated bot accounts. Just like there is a market for drugs and other illegal things, there is a market you never hear about... the black hat hacker market.
No one ever stopped building botnets, they just started getting paid to do it, and they learned to do it impeccably.
What we think of as "the internet" is actually something only nerds and social rejects use. Social media is mainly used by the very young and very old. Every thing else on the internet is DEAD. There is no one here. The vast majority of people are LIVING IN REAL LIFE.
The few people who are using the internet are subject to the whim of THE BEAST
