Reddit's Co-Founder Thinks the Internet Is Being Rebuilt for Machines

Alexis Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit, thinks building social apps has stopped being interesting. The internet, he said this week, is losing the quality that made it human-centred, and the next generation of user-generated content may not look like a social network at all — more like a much better group chat.

“My internet growing up was built for humans first,” he said at the first WIRED World Fair. Increasingly, he argued, services will be designed for AI agents rather than people, and the familiar interface may fade as a result.

He is sympathetic to the “dead internet theory” — the idea that a growing share of what looks like online activity is generated by bots rather than people. Large language models have made that cheaper and easier, and agents now browse, click and post at scale.

The irony is that this has made Reddit more valuable rather than less. Its archive of real human conversation is exactly the material model builders want, and the company has licensed it to Google and OpenAI. “Platforms like ours have become very, very valuable to large language models,” Ohanian said.

Value cuts both ways. Reddit warned last week that Google's AI search was hurting the traffic it sends to the site, and the stock fell as much as 29%. When human conversation becomes commercially valuable data, Ohanian argues, it also becomes worth manipulating — and that, more than any technical change, is what makes the web easy to distort.

His prescriptions are modest and awkward. Reddit has said it will require users to log in, to limit scraping and hold on to engagement. Ohanian did not endorse that directly, but said the internet needs a way to show that a user is a real person — without turning identity into a privacy tax.

He is not, in the end, a pessimist. Ohanian runs the venture firm Seven Seven Six, was an early investor in Anthropic, and expects AI to deliver real progress in medicine provided the industry is careful about the harm it can also do. His own bet on human gathering has moved offline: he invests in sports, on the theory that a stadium is one of the few places left where a crowd is genuinely a crowd.