Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian
Ohanian now leads the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, which manages over $1.3 billion in assets. To combat third-party data scraping and protect user engagement, Reddit recently announced it will require users to sign in.
Speaking with WIRED at the inaugural WIRED World Fair recently, Ohanian warned that while AI holds massive promise, “there is still a very real chance that this technology can cause a lot of harm for sure. ” Ohanian also said that building traditional social media apps is “not cool anymore”, as much of the web has been compromised, leaving him searching for what comes next for user-generated content (UGC). Lately, he has turned his attention to sports, an area where he still sees genuine, real-life communities thriving “in the age of AI slop” and a “manipulated” internet. He is an open proponent of the “Dead Internet Theory,” the idea that bots now generate a massive share of online content and activity. Large language models have put this trend into overdrive, with AI agents rapidly outpacing real people, according to Ohanian.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian believes the internet as we know it is fundamentally broken, and artificial intelligence (AI) is both a symptom and a driver of the shift. he stressed that “there has to be provable humanity on the internet without being creepy While Ohanian declined to say whether he supports that specific policy. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
Just last week, Reddit’s shares dropped 29% after the company warned that Google’s AI-powered search was eating into its referral traffic.
“The internet has gotten so manipulated because it is so incredibly valuable to do so,” he said. On the other hand, the technology is undercutting the business. Beyond the stock price, Ohanian worries that turning online discussions into a commercial product has ruined their authenticity, leaving them full of “bullshit.
“The internet that I grew up on … that was really built for humans first; user interfaces and experiences are going to go away,” Ohanian said, explaining that the web is increasingly being built for AI agents rather than human users. “Platforms like ours became very, very valuable to LLMs,” Ohanian noted. The boom in generative AI has created a complicated reality for platforms like Reddit. On one hand, Reddit’s massive archive of human conversations has become a goldmine, leading to lucrative data-licensing deals with companies like Google and OpenAI to train their models.