Alexis Ohanian wants to figure out the future of user-generated content. According to the Reddit cofounder, building social media apps is “not cool anymore” and so much of the internet has been compromised.
“I’m expecting some better version of the group chat to be that new version of UGC,” Ohanian told WIRED senior correspondent Lauren Goode at the inaugural WIRED World Fair.
Ohanian has a complicated relationship with the internet. He resigned from Reddit in 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, to make room for a Black board member and to pressure the company to reform its content moderation policies. The social site had been notorious for hosting violent and harmful rhetoric. Ohanian reflects on recently learning someone with a Reddit tattoo—once a sign of the site’s success to Ohanian—had since covered it up: “I don’t blame him.”
He now runs venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, which has over $1.3 billion in assets under management. He focuses on sports, where he finds real-life communities “in the age of AI slop” and a “manipulated” internet.
Ohanian is a proponent of the “Dead Internet Theory”—the idea that a lot of online activity and content is being generated by bots. Large language models have turbocharged this, with AI agents outrunning human users. “The internet that I grew up on … that was really built for humans first; user interfaces and experiences are going to go away,” said Ohanian, “because more of the internet is going to get created for these agents to use, [rather] than for people.”
In some ways, the advance in generative AI has been lucrative for sites like Reddit, which has licensed its vast archive of human conversations to companies including Google and OpenAI to train AI models. “Platforms like ours became very, very valuable to LLMs,” Ohanian said.
But the technology has also undermined the business. Reddit shares plunged 29 percent last week after the platform warned that Google’s AI-powered search was hurting referral traffic. Ohanian also worries the commercialisation of these conversations means they are full of “bullshit.” “The internet has gotten so manipulated because it is so incredibly valuable to do so,” he said.
Reddit recently said it would require users to sign in to fight third-party scraping and keep up user engagement. While Ohanian declined to say whether he agrees with the move, “there has to be provable humanity on the internet without being creepy.”
An early Anthropic investor, Ohanian is nonetheless optimistic about the potential benefits of AI. He is especially excited to see medical breakthroughs from the technology. “There is still a very real chance that this technology can cause a lot of harm for sure,” he said. “I think we have to be sober about how we’re building and what we’re doing, but I still can’t help but see all of the things that can get so demonstrably better.”