Who really were the mysterious Sea Peoples blamed for the late Bronze Age Collapse in the Mediterranean area?

There was a paper boy kidnapped a route over from my paper route in the mid-80's I've spent a lot of time reading about him to the point that I've made comments on Reddit and have been contacted by others wanting to interview me about it.

Once I spent 6 hours researching how people accidentally join cults, and by the end I was like… yeah I get how it happens.

I have one for this.

I had some expired Triscuit crackers. I wanted to know if I could still eat them with some (non-expired) dip. So I typed it into Google.

And one of the top hits is this ShopSavvy site, that's all AI generated.

But the other hits are similar. Bargain Boxed. Discover Real Food in Texas. They're all AI-generated blogspam, all built on a very similar template, and all of them are populated with links to other AI-generated sites like this.

I scraped through a bunch of the links, and found that there are more than a dozen different domains in this ring, all linking to each other to game the search results and get top SEO.

...but I can't figure out why! They aren't running ads, and don't have affiliate links.

Sourdough Symphony.

Trivial Bites.

My Kitchen Hacks.

Ingredient Savvy.

Grain Free Goodness.

All of them using AI generated text and images. All of them linking to each other.

Eventually, I dug into the owners and figured out that they're linked to a company called Ashfount Investments. But that site is also all AI generated! All the members are stock photos, it's all fake, all the way down.

All of this to tell me if my Triscuits go bad, seemingly.

If anyone has the slightest idea what the purpose behind these sites is, please let me know.

Opened YouTube to check one recipe. Four hours later, I’m watching a guy build a pool in the jungle with a stick.

A young woman on Reddit said she was going to off herself. Using her post history I figured out where she lived, where she worked, called and spoke to someone who knew her IRL, they gave me the name of her boyfriend. Found his number. Turns out that he had broken up with her but still cared so he went over and stopped her. I was up all night.

This was all under a different username from the one I currently use.

Idk if it’s the deepest ever but during covid I was bored like everyone else and joined a fb group called “investigation connection” and someone posted that they were adopted and looking for their siblings. In another life id be a PI and covid gave me plenty of time for internet sleuthing. I stayed up all night, but I found a girls entire family. She had tried her entire life to find them. After Covid she got to meet them and tagged me in it. Pretty cool.

My personal fave :

Local cops had a scam - they put a 45mph limit sign on an interstate where the limit was 55 ( late 1970's). And would pull over out of state cars- ticket plus a cash "bond". Want to see the judge ? Sure , he's my brother in law...

Cop pulls over a mid 20's black man driving a nice sedan with out of state plates. The young man comments that this is illegal. He is invited (in cuffs) to see the judge. The judge fined him $50. He refuses. The judge sentences him to 5 days in jail. No phone call, no lawyer, nothing.

5 days later the young man leaves.

And returns a week later with a number of his co-workers. And arrest warrants for the sheriff and the judge.

The young man was an FBI agent en route to his new assignment.

Oops.

I literally used to be scared to share pillows because I thought my dreams could be trapped in it and it’d move into someone else’s head if they laid on my pillow.

I used to collect rocks and when my mom told me to throw them i away i would just hide them because i tought that if i threw the rocks back outside they would get cold when winter would come and i tought they would be sad because first i would take then with me and give them a warm place to be and then i would just throw them away and i just tought what if i was the rock? How would i feel?