Reddit Founder: Social Media Is 'Not Cool Anymore'
Original: Reddit Founder Says Building Social Media Apps Is ‘Not Cool Anymore’
Why This Matters
AI-generated content is now materially hurting social platforms' traffic and credibility.
Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian said at WIRED World Fair that building social media apps has lost its appeal, blaming AI-generated content and bot activity for degrading the open internet's value for human users.
Alexis Ohanian, who cofounded Reddit and resigned from its board in 2020, told WIRED senior correspondent Lauren Goode at the inaugural WIRED World Fair that social media development is 'not cool anymore.' He pointed to what he calls a compromised internet—one increasingly populated by bots and AI-generated content—as the reason. He endorses the 'Dead Internet Theory,' the idea that much online activity is now synthetic, and argues large language models have accelerated the problem. 'The internet that I grew up on was really built for humans first,' he said, warning that interfaces are being rebuilt for AI agents rather than people. His VC firm Seven Seven Six manages over $1.3 billion in assets, with a focus on sports as a source of genuine human community. On Reddit specifically: the platform has profited by licensing its human-generated content archive to Google and OpenAI, but Reddit shares dropped 29% last week after the company warned that Google's AI-powered search was cutting referral traffic. Ohanian, an early Anthropic investor, still sees medical breakthroughs as a reason for cautious optimism about AI, but insists 'we have to be sober about how we're building.' His prediction for what comes next: 'some better version of the group chat' as the new form of user-generated content.