From WIRED · Isabella Ward · · 1m 20s
Reddit founder: social media is broken
Alexis Ohanian says building social media apps is no longer worthwhile as AI and bots have corrupted the internet beyond repair.
In brief
Alexis Ohanian says building social media apps is no longer worthwhile as AI and bots have corrupted the internet beyond repair. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says social media apps are no longer worth building because AI, bots and manipulation have compromised the internet. Originally reported by WIRED.
Building social media is not cool anymore
Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian told WIRED at the inaugural WIRED World Fair that building social media apps is no longer worthwhile. He expects group chats to become the new form of user-generated content.
“I'm expecting some better version of the group chat to be that new version of UGC”
The internet is now run by bots, not humans
Ohanian believes in the Dead Internet Theory: that most online activity is generated by bots and AI agents rather than people. Large language models have turbocharged this shift, creating content for machines instead of humans.
“The internet that I grew up on … that was really built for humans first; user interfaces and experiences are going to go away”
Reddit profited from AI but got hurt by it
Reddit licensed its archive of human conversations to Google and OpenAI to train AI models, making the platform valuable to large language models.
“Platforms like ours became very, very valuable to LLMs”
The internet needs provable humanity
Ohanian worries that commercialisation has filled the internet with false content. He says there must be provable humanity online without being creepy, though he declined to say if he supports Reddit's new sign-in requirement to…
“there has to be provable humanity on the internet without being creepy”
At a glance
Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says social media apps are no longer worth building because AI, bots and manipulation have compromised the internet.
