Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian says ‘much of the internet is dead’ – and the rise of bots and ‘quasi-AI, LinkedIn slop’ has killed it
Over the past four years, the “dead internet theory” emerged as a conspiracy claiming that the online world was taken over by robots and automatically generated content run by an algorithm that would eventually thwart human activity online and control the world’s population.
According to Alexis Ohanian, investor and co-founder of Reddit, there is some truth to this idea, and a new era of social media will emerge thanks to it.
“You’re all proving that a lot of the Internet is now just dead – this whole dead Internet theory, right, whether it’s booted, whether it’s quasi-AI, whether it’s LinkedIn slop,” Ohanian said while speaking to the hosts of the TBPN podcast on Monday. “Having proof of life, like viewers and live content, is really valuable for retaining attention.”
Last month, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman came to a similar conclusion: “I never took the dead internet theory seriously, but it seems like there are definitely a lot of Twitter accounts run by LLM now,” he wrote on X.
In a very 21st century trajectory, the theory began as a 2021 article by “IlluminatiPirate” on the Agora Road forum and was quickly commented on by The Atlantic under the headline “Maybe You Missed It, But The Internet “Died” Five Years Ago. » (At press time, the original thread had been viewed more than 363,000 times.) Data from cybersecurity companies increasingly confirms the IlluminatiPirate’s worldview. Nearly a third of all internet traffic came from bots in the past 12 months, according to data from cybersecurity platform Cloudflare. Meanwhile, Imperva’s “Bad Bot Report” released in July found that nearly 50% of internet traffic came from non-human sources, including 20% from “bad bots” engaging in malicious activity.
While the actions of these bots can be as harmless as generating generic, even absurd, comments on social media posts, they can also generate false page views, user impressions, and session durations, skewing and inflating metrics that can be used to misrepresent a company’s strength. As business leaders and economists begin to take fears of an AI bubble more seriously, the proliferation of unleashed internet bots has become more alarming because of their potential to distort data critical to assessing the sustainability and growth of emerging technology companies.
Making the Internet more human
For Ohanian, the solution to mitigating the power of robots on the Internet is perhaps more romantic: Apps should be more human.
“I think we’ll see a new generation of social media coalesce that is demonstrably human, because everything is happening in group chats now — it’s not a new technology,” Ohanian said. “There has to be a next iteration of this, because that’s where we all get our best information now.”
Described by New York Times With cultural critic Sophie Haigney considered an “anti-social medium,” group chat has become a popular – and private – forum for discussing cultural phenomena, personal lives and politics.
Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semafor, reported in April that the panel discussions were so influential that they even “changed America.” A Signal group named Chatham House, primarily revolving around venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, had “fueled a new alliance” between the tech industry and the right in American politics, Smith reported, while also discovering other “power group chats” on Signal, WhatsApp, and even a pro-China group on WeChat.
The hypothetical shift to platforms based on more intimate human interactions is in part the result not only of the rise of robots, but also of a crowded AI space that currently leaves room only for companies looking less to challenge heavyweights like OpenAI and Google, and more to create offbeat products to please, Ohanian noted.
“I think we’re going to have some really enjoyable, fun consumer experiences where some scrappy founders from Brooklyn, like the guys at Doji, will be able to say, ‘Hey, let’s make shopping fun again using this technology,’” he said.
Doji is an AI-powered platform that allows an avatar of users to try on various outfits. Ohanian’s venture capital firm, Seven Seven Six, participated in the startup’s $14 million seed funding round earlier this year.
“How do you make products that are truly interesting for the end consumer? » said Ohanian.
