Alexis Ohanian, who helped build Reddit, says he’s not thrilled with the state of the internet.
On Monday’s episode of TBPN, Ohanian took a moment to express his admiration for hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays — and express his frustration with the state of the internet. What once was a point of connectivity, he said, has become inhuman.
“You all prove the point that so much of the internet is now dead,” he told the hosts.
Ohanian said that much of the internet was “botted” or “quasi-AI,” referencing the proliferation of “LinkedIn slop.”
The Reddit cofounder referenced “dead internet theory,” which asserts that there is more bot activity than human activity on the web.
In September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that he “never took the dead internet theory that seriously,” but that now he sees “a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts.”
Ohanian said that the internet needed to be the opposite of dead, with “live viewers and live content.” He said that holding attention required “proof of life.”
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“I think we’ll see a next generation of social media emerge that’s verifiably human, because it’s all going down in the group chats now,” he said.
Group chats have boomed in recent years. That’s not just via text; users are also turning to apps like Signal and Discord for a human-to-human connection. In 2024, some frequent group chatters told Business Insider that they’d started sharing their thoughts there instead of on Twitter.
Even your group chat isn’t safe, though. Some texters have begun using AI to generate and edit their messages, bringing another level of bots to the forum.
Ohanian said these group chats were the golden standard — but they weren’t “novel tech.”
“There’s got to be some next iteration of that, because that’s where all of us are getting our really best info now,” he said.
