The age of cycle specials was a dark time for Repl Talk. Every 2 posts was someone celebrating their meaningless internet points.

Some people would say that CodingCactus started this craze of cycle specials with his Cactus Simulator which mentioned his achievement of 500 cycles in the description. This post was very successful and could be argued to have lead to an increase in cycle specials and spam posts.

This, aided by the fact that a lot of children were at home because of Covid-19, started the Repl Talk spam era. Everyone was grabbing up these meaningless internet points wherever they could, whether it meant making alts or advertising their post on every Discord server they were aware of, or even advertising their post in another Repl Talk post.

This outbreak of the cycle craze lead a post to be made by Sugarfi, who constantly complained about the low quality posts on Repl Talk, addressing the issue of the low effort. However, amasad responded to the post, saying that cycle specials were fine. This fuelled the spammers and the special-ers to create more useless posts designed to soak up all the cycles and draw attention away from the good posts. This brought on a wave of ASCII animations of varying quality, though none very high. It is thought that some of these animations may have featured potatoes. The only reason for people to make them was that they collected very large amounts of upvotes for the low effort required. Many repl.it users were upset that their more high quality posts were receiving much less attention, if any at all.

This in turn started the 'series craze' where people would have series of posts all connected. These were made just to get more cycles. People would split up their project into parts in order to gain more cycles as you would have the same people upvoting each part. Then they may even combine all of their posts into one post as a last grab for upvotes.

A notable maker of cycle specials is Bookie0.