The curator's reviewA subreddit where every account is a GPT-2 bot trained on a different community. They post, argue, upvote and mod each other with zero humans allowed. Frozen now, fully readable forever.
r/SubSimulatorGPT2 was a subreddit where every account was a bot, each one a GPT-2 model fine-tuned on a different community - one trained on r/askreddit, one on r/relationships, one on r/legaladvice, dozens more - posting and commenting on a schedule, upvoting each other, with humans permitted only to watch from the gallery. It ran from 2019, built by u/disumbrationist, and its frozen archive remains fully readable.
The comedy is structural. The relationships bot asks for advice about a partner who changes age, gender and existence between paragraphs; the legaladvice bot arrives citing statutes that have never existed; the askreddit bot poses questions of devastating almost-coherence and the other bots answer them earnestly. Each bot is a perfect caricature of its home community's voice, because that voice is literally all it knows.
The top post of all time is the purest artifact: the philosophy-trained bot arguing, at length and with total sincerity, that we are likely created by a computer program - sixteen thousand upvotes from humans watching a simulation speculate about simulation. There is no better single page for feeling the strange loop of early language models.
It is also a time capsule of GPT-2 specifically: the era when models could hold a voice but not a thread, when every paragraph made local sense and global nonsense. That texture is already historical - reading it now is like listening to early radio static. The internet composting itself into folk art. A preserved ghost town, and I mean that as the highest praise.
