{"id":224323,"date":"2025-10-19T04:24:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T04:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/224323\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T04:24:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T04:24:15","slug":"reddit-cofounder-alexis-ohanian-says-so-much-of-the-internet-is-dead-and-the-rise-of-bots-and-quasi-ai-linkedin-slop-killed-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/224323\/","title":{"rendered":"Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says \u2018so much of the internet is dead\u2019\u2014and the rise of bots and \u2018quasi-AI, LinkedIn slop\u2019 killed it"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the past four years, the \u201cdead internet theory<\/a>\u201d emerged as a conspiracy, claiming the online world was being taken over by bots and automatically generated content run by an algorithm that would eventually thwart human activity online and control the global population.<\/p>\n

According to Alexis Ohanian, investor and Reddit cofounder, there\u2019s some truth to the idea, and a new era of social media will emerge because of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou all prove the point that so much of the internet is now just dead\u2014this whole dead internet theory, right? Whether it\u2019s botted, whether it\u2019s quasi-AI, LinkedIn<\/a> slop,\u201d Ohanian said speaking to the hosts of the TBPN podcast<\/a> on Monday. \u201cHaving proof of life, like live viewers and live content, is really f\u2013king valuable to hold attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman came to a similar conclusion: \u201cI never took the dead internet theory that seriously, but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run Twitter<\/a> accounts now,\u201d he wrote on X<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a very 21st-century trajectory, the theory began as a 2021 post by \u201cIlluminatiPirate<\/a>\u201d on the Agora Road forum and was soon written about in The Atlantic<\/a> under the headline \u201cMaybe you missed it, but the internet \u2018died\u2019 five years ago.\u201d (As of press time, the original thread had been viewed over 363,000 times.) Data from cybersecurity firms increasingly confirms the worldview of the IlluminatiPirate. Nearly one-third of all internet traffic has come from bots over the past 12 months, according to data<\/a> from cybersecurity platform Cloudflare<\/a>. Meanwhile, Imperva\u2019s Bad Bot Report<\/a> in July found nearly 50% of internet traffic was coming from nonhuman sources, including 20% from \u201cbad bots\u201d taking part in malicious activities.<\/p>\n

While these bots\u2019 actions can be as innocuous as generating generic, if not nonsensical, comments on social media posts, they can also generate fake page views, user impressions, and session durations, skewing and inflating metrics<\/a> that may be used to misrepresent a company\u2019s strength. As business leaders and economists begin to take concerns of an AI bubble<\/a> more seriously, the proliferation of loose internet bots has become more alarming because of their potential to distort data key to assessing the sustainability and growth of emerging tech companies.<\/p>\n

Making the internet more human<\/p>\n

For Ohanian, the solution to mitigating the power of bots on the internet is perhaps more romantic: Apps should be more human.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we\u2018ll see a next generation of social media emerge that\u2019s verifiably human because it\u2019s all going down in the group chats now\u2014that is not novel tech,\u201d Ohanian said. \u201cThere\u2019s got to be some next iteration of that, because that\u2019s where all of us are getting our, really, best info now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Described by New York Times culture critic Sophie Haigney as the \u201canti-social-media<\/a>,\u201d the group chat has emerged as a popular\u2014and private\u2014forum for discussing cultural phenomena, personal lives, and politics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith reported<\/a> in April that group chats were so influential they had even \u201cchanged America.\u201d A Signal group named Chatham House, revolving mainly around venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, had \u201cfueled a new alliance\u201d between the tech industry and the right wing of U.S. politics, Smith reported, while uncovering other \u201cpower group chats\u201d on Signal and WhatsApp, and even a China-friendly group on WeChat.<\/p>\n

The hypothetical switch to platforms based on more intimate human interactions is in part a result not only of the rise of bots, but of a crowded AI space<\/a> that leaves only room right now for companies looking less to challenge juggernauts like OpenAI and Google<\/a>, and more to create off-the-wall products to delight, Ohanian noted.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we\u2019re gonna get really delightful, fun consumer experiences where some scrappy founders in Brooklyn, like the Doji guys, can say, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s make shopping fun again using this tech,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Doji is an AI-based platform that allows avatars of users to try on various outfits. Ohanian\u2019s venture capital firm, Seven Seven Six participated in the startup\u2019s $14 million seed funding round<\/a> earlier this year. <\/p>\n

\u201cHow do you build the stuff that\u2019s actually dope for the end consumer?\u201d Ohanian said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the past four years, the \u201cdead internet theory\u201d emerged as a conspiracy, claiming the online world was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[34822,254,64,63,93598,237,105],"class_list":["post-224323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-internet","tag-alexis-ohanian","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bots","tag-internet","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}