Pollyanna's Corpse
Content Warning: Suicide.
The Metaphor
This story isn’t about something unique or new or even surprising. The events themselves aren’t especially extraordinary: an anonymous online account goes silent for a while, then seems to come back under new control. The evidence isn’t damning—just hints and circumstantial clues. No grand revelations or discoveries drove me to write this; it was the small details that kept tugging at my brain. The metaphor baked into the name, “Pollyanna’s Corpse,” kept drawing me back. So let’s start there, with the metaphor.
In case you’re unaware, Pollyanna is a 1913 novel by Eleanor H. Porter that tells the story of Pollyanna Whittier, an eleven-year-old orphan who insists on finding the silver lining in every situation, no matter how grim. Since then, the book has become a cultural touchstone. It has lent its name to a form of psychological bias and spawned numerous adaptations and references; from Disney’s 1960 film adaptation to a 1986 animated series, and even a song in one of my favorite video game franchises. The name Pollyanna has come to represent this trait, relentless optimism, positivity in the face of adversity, unyielding hope.
So, now that we’re caught up, we can look back to our metaphor, “Pollyanna’s Corpse.” Perhaps it signifies the death of hope, or if we look more closely at what a corpse is—that which remains after all hope, optimism, and positivity are lost. A bleak concept—certainly not one I hope to instill in the reader—but not one I invented. No, our metaphor comes from the aptonymous handle of a Reddit user.
The Account
I stumbled across the Reddit account u/Pollyannas_corpse through its oddly bot-like behavior. I wasn’t the one to initially notice it, I saw a reply to one of their comments calling it out as likely machine-generated. At the time, it was posting an average of one comment a day, its comments left in a variety of different subreddits, spouting what seems to be LLM generated drivel—vapid, yet like Pollyanna, always positive.
I can’t prove these comments were generated algorithmically. They certainly could be written by a human. Many of them seemed to follow predictable patterns such as “Mine is thing” followed by description of thing. However, whether it was man or machine doing the writing is inconsequential, the key insight is simply that these appear to be rather sterile comments most likely intended to build the account’s reputation. Further proof of the owner’s preoccupation with the reputation of the account is provided by this post.
A post to r/WhatIsMyCQS, a subreddit where the automoderator is set up to provide users with an automated response displaying their CQS, Contributor Quality Score. CQS is a semi-invisible metric that Reddit uses to grade accounts on how likely they are to “contribute positively,” attempting to give lower scores to spammers and troll accounts and higher scores to users who consistently contribute to the community. You can read more about CQS here.
Glancing at their userpage would suggest that this post is the first activity made by this account, of course one might imagine that previous account activity had been removed. This is a pattern of behavior that can be observed tens of thousands of times over. An account is purchased or compromised, the new “owner” deletes, or attempts to delete, all previous account activity and then checks its “value” to go on to use it for whatever purposes they choose. The motives are varied, these accounts may be used for marketing or simply improved and resold for economic gain, or to push narratives for those with political or ideological motives.
That Which Remains
Over the years of scaling from a handful of users in 2005 to almost 80 million daily users in 2024, Reddit’s data model has evolved and become rather baroque. Content is partitioned, sharded, and cached, across a variety of different storage systems. For anyone trying to remove evidence of older account activity, this means that it’s easy for traces to slip through the cracks. Accessing a list of comments made by a particular account may yield different results whether you’re using the standard website, Reddit’s API, old.reddit.com, etc. In the case of u/Pollyannas_corpse a handful of comments made to a quarantined subreddit six years prior to that r/WhatIsMyCQS post managed to elude their deletion attempts… and what they reveal is unsettling.
These posts were made to r/TimeToGo, a subreddit whose stated goal is “to listen to those who are dealing with the difficult choice of killing themselves.” The first post in that screenshot I find particularly chilling, this user clearly was contemplating suicide at the time. I admit it’s entirely possible that they had a change of heart, managed to turn things around, and after taking an extended break from posting have come back with a renewed sense of positivity. If this is the case then I offer a sincere apology for bringing up a dark chapter of their life. It seems far more likely that this person is now deceased and their inactive account was later compromised.
In addition to what was still stored on Reddit, anything posted in a public forum is free to be downloaded and saved elsewhere. I was able to find one more post made by u/Pollyannas_corpse in a raw dataset on huggingface.co. A set of posts and comments to Reddit was collected to be used for LLM training and it contains a single, heartbreaking, post to r/offmychest:
“i want someone to like me because nobody does. just for a bit. just to have someone. anyone. i need an anchor. just for a little while. i am so tired.”
Of course, it’s also possible that this was simply a throwaway account used during a dark time in its creator’s life, but this isn’t just about u/Pollyannas_corpse. With around 5 billion active social media users in the world—more than half of the world’s population—this exact scenario will play out time and time again.
Respect For The Dead
Across cultures and throughout history, the belief that the dead deserve respect has been near universal. From ancient burial rites to modern human rights laws, humanity has long agreed that both the bodies and the legacies of those who have passed should be treated with both care and dignity. It is one of the most basic aspects of human rights in civilized society. Such cultural norms are ingrained in us through the experience of living within a society. Taboos are discouraged, while we are guided toward behaviors that are celebrated.
To compromise such a fundamental right—respect for the dead—reveals a far more troubling truth: we have built a culture that neglects even the most essential aspects of humanity. In prioritizing efficiency, engagement, and profit over compassion and accountability, we have failed to uphold the values that bind societies together. The basic dignity owed to individuals is sacrificed in the name of growth and convenience.
As we build online communities and the platforms they rely on, we are, in effect, designing a new, global culture. When we design systems to algorithmically decide what content to display to users we are rewarding some behaviors while punishing others, creating the social mores of this new culture. Without careful thought and intention, we risk failing to establish norms that incentivize respect and accountability.
Much has been said about the effects of LLMs, but make no mistake—these tools simply accelerate the actions of humans. This is what we have rewarded with views, with eyeballs, with influence; this is what humans asked for. These systems are not acting independently; they are merely doing what we implicitly asked for, it is the culmination of what we have rewarded with attention, time, and trust.
If we don’t strive to do better, this will become our collective legacy: our words repurposed to train marketing bots, our digital remains reanimated as zombies in cheap suits—hawking products or pushing political agendas. The network will become a necropolis.
The dead internet will be populated by the dead.
J. C. Miller
November 25, 2024