Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
The Internet

Reddit Cofounder Says 'Much of the Internet is Now Dead' (businessinsider.com) 93

Posted by msmash from the dead-internet-theory dept.
Alexis Ohanian, who helped build Reddit, says much of the internet has become dominated by bots and AI. Speaking on the podcast TBPN, he described the internet as increasingly "quasi-AI" and filled with what he called "LinkedIn slop." Ohanian referenced dead internet theory, the assertion that bot activity exceeds human activity on the web. In September, Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, posted that while he had not taken the theory seriously, he now sees "a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Reddit Cofounder Says 'Much of the Internet is Now Dead' More

Reddit Cofounder Says 'Much of the Internet is Now Dead'

Comments Filter:

  • Always has been. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @03:45PM (#65727596) Homepage Journal

    Before the bots, it was troll farms. Now the troll farmers have lost their jobs, replaced by software. Plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose.

    • Before all that it was nerds and then people but now the Internet, or much of it, has been taken over by the rich and powerful, just like they took over everything else. Money is power and these people's greed is insatiable. Money is power, power corrupts. Sadly they are as incompetent as they are unethical, the upper class is busy running our economy into the ground once again. AI has nothing to do with it, but we see a lot of fear and contempt for AI. We always see this from the fundamentalists who strug

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

      What killed Reddit was excessive moderation and corporate control of all the main subreddits.

      • Re:Always has been. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by RamenMan ( 7301402 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @05:21PM (#65727846)

        I think that what killed Reddit is the same thing we are suffering from on a daily basis- an obsession with politics. And more specifically, using politics as a way to judge/hate other people.

        Politics has take the place of religion. You have to hate the other guys, because they are bad. There is no redemption possible. The louder your voice, and the more you can put down the other team, the better person you are judged to be.

        I take part in the discgolf subreddit. It's about...disc golf. And even that subreddit has let politics leak in, and it has gone downhill drastically. As soon as politics becomes an issue, all judgments are made through that lens. People are no longer judged on their disc golf skills, but rather they are judged based on the fringe political issues.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

          We can't really discuss politics on Reddit when people are banned for being different or honest, people get moderated, labelled as 'unpleasant' and then banned. Mainstream Reddit is conformists, propaganda and leftovers now. The small subreddits depend upon the whims of the owners.

          • As supposed to the old the donald subreddit, who would ban you for even mildly dissenting opinion. The fascist censorship ideology is on the far right. The far left will engage and debate you in good faith, at least until you come back with gaslights, ad hominems, and deflections.

            • As supposed to the old the donald subreddit, who would ban you for even mildly dissenting opinion. The fascist censorship ideology is on the far right. The far left will engage and debate you in good faith, at least until you come back with gaslights, ad hominems, and deflections.

              You're part of the problem. Let's just say the bar for labelling an opponent as a gaslighter/ad hominem/deflection is far lower than you would think. Mildly dissenting opinions are nuked all the time on left leaning subreddits.

              • The rise of people who adopt political, social or other beliefs as dogma is the problem.

                It prevents any discussion and only allows for parroting 'approved' viewpoints. It goes for the left, right, pro/anti social cause X, gender X/gender Y and lots of more groups.

                When you are not allowed to present a scientific research paper, government statistic or other piece backing up your position, there is no debate... only dogma.

                The only facts which seem to be allowed are are 30 year old data sets, scientific resea

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

                When so many people are not only right but so far on the right that everything else looks like it's on the left, that's a problem because the middle and even moderated right looks left to them. Indeed, being so far left or right is sure sign of extremism. It's not left or far right that's the problem, it being extremely far left or right to the point where extreme positions deny balanced approaches and justify contempt, denial and ultimately violence.

                The other problem is being so far on the extreme that one

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

                Besides, left versus right is just divide and conquer when all our political parties are owned and controlled by upper class influences via campaign contributions and political lobbying. It does not matter who we vote for when all our representatives only support the interests of the rich and the powerful over the needs of the poor and the powerless.

                Money is power, power corrupts, absolute wealth corrupts absolutely.

        • So we shouldn't say anything when a politician does hateful things?
          • If a Democrat says anything bad about our glorious president or Saint Charlie Kirk then you should immediately do everything you can to get that person fired and make sure you release their address information online. /s

            And yes I did feel the need to put the label at the end indicating sasarcasmecause I live in a world where the Health and human services secretary just said fluoride denies you God and right wingers believe homelander is a hero.... I mean for fucks sake we should have known how screwed w
          • You can do it on the politicians do hateful things subreddit instead of the disc golf subreddit.

        • Lol no that political content would hardly exist except for troll farms.

        • I'm really fed up with this both sides bad bullshit. The right wing is just wrong and their policies have been proven time and again not to work and to be solely there to benefit the ruling elite at the expense of literally everyone else. This is just a fact and I am not going to argue it anymore than I'm going to argue whether the Earth is more than 6000 years old or whether it's round and orbits the Sun.

          Trickle down doesn't work. Great man theory is a lie. Single-payer healthcare systems are superior

          • That's all really fantastic. I'm glad you feel strongly about that.

            But do you have any idea how out of place that is in a disc golf forum? It's like if someone were a missionary, and they kept telling me about how the gods, and their prophets are better than all of the rest.

            But I don't really want to hear that. I want to talk about disc golf.

            That's why those people have killed the internet. It's like it has been flooded with zealots who think it's their life purpose to spread the message that they belie

            • The trouble is "keeping politics out" isn't really a thing, because politics more or less supersedes everything, ultimately.

              Politics is what could cause the government to ban disc golf under penalty of death. Not likely today, sure, but if it happens, it's politics that makes it happen. Politics could much more likely get it banned from your local park.

              And people are people and you cannot escape that. Sooner or later people chat off topic and someone might mention they have a baby for example. Then /u/babye

              • The trouble is "keeping politics out" isn't really a thing, because politics more or less supersedes everything, ultimately.

                I think that's a relatively recent development (in the US, anyways).

                Prior to the past few decades Democrats and Republicans were parts of the same communities: they'd go the same churches, shop in the same grocery stores, watched the same TV shows, maybe played disc golf at the same courses. Recently that has measurably changed (with the exception of the disc golf situation where there probably isn't data to substantiate the argument). The amount of overlap between Republicans and Democrats in the facto

                • I think that's a relatively recent development (in the US, anyways). Prior to the past few decades Democrats and Republicans were parts of the same communities: they'd go the same churches, shop in the same grocery stores, watched the same TV shows, maybe played disc golf at the same courses. Recently that has measurably changed (with the exception of the disc golf situation where there probably isn't data to substantiate the argument). The amount of overlap between Republicans and Democrats in the factors

              • this is the nut of the problem here. "keeping politics out of X" is much more doable and makes much more sense when you live in a stable political environment. having someone bitch about the president in your local forum seems annoying and stupid back when, say, clinton was president. but when you live in a world where the president decides to send military troops to your neighborhood claiming it's on fire when it most clearly is not, there's no way to keep politics out of it.

            • You were talking about politics encroaching on non-political forms. Yeah that's annoying and I agree. The crochet forums had the basically ban all political discussion because right wingers kept coming in.

              But that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about or the point you raised about both sides bad. That's what I'm addressing. I'm addressing it because I'm really sick of it because my country is falling into a Nazi style fascist dictatorship and it's doing it very quickly and I've got guys like you
        • Remarkable how many responders to your comment quickly illustrated your point. And missed it. You may be on to something!

        • I think political discussion is increasing in the USA because the USA has been troubled for a very long time and it is coming to a head. Most people want to talk about how cute cats are or what they did today, not waste time getting worked up over stupid and corrupt political shit.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

          No, sorry. I'm not buying it.

          I don't hate the other guy for "their politics". I hate them because they are racist, neo-nazi, fascists, misogynists, anti-american, anti-freedom, and anti-democracy.

          They are busy tearing the country down and cheering about it. That's why I hate them. Not "their politics"

          Now, you can call all that "politics" and just shrug, but then fuck you. This is about way more than "politics"

          *Real* Republicans would never be on board with this MAGA shit.

    • Re:Always has been. (Score:4, Informative)

      by ve3oat ( 884827 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @06:23PM (#65727986) Homepage
      A small point : "la" rather than "le". As in "la même chose".
      • If we're going to be pedantic.. the standard expression is "plus ça change plus c'est pareil". Plus c'est la même chose is overly long, and sounds weird ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      In spite of the UID, you sound new around here.

      But the joke I was looking for was about his/Reddit's contribution to the enshitification.

      I actually started networking with audio modems and BBSes and later found usenet. Yeah, Eliza existed, but wasn't fooling anyone or passing any Turing tests. However near the end of those days one of my friends wrote a pretty impressive travesty generator, and you could argue that sort of thing was the great-granddad 10 times removed of ChatGPT and f[r]iends. (With the obl

  • Comment Subject: (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    when the bulk of the "training corpus" is corposlop you're going to see* them retreat into more "pure" data from the past, lest their models get mad cow disease, or whatever they call the phenomenon for surging derails/hallucination when you train AI on AI (kinda like when you dump a text into language translators and toggle back and forth until it's all pronouns and vagaries)

    *well, not so much directly see, it'll be decisions/deals behind closed doors, they don't air desperations publicly

  • Be very quiet (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @03:52PM (#65727622)
    We're starting a new internet for people, don't let the bots know.
    • Not worried. Real talent is obvious. I remember hearing Aaron Lewis (Staind) and Fred Durst playing "Outside" on the radio back in 99/2000, thought it was a decent song at the time. Didn't know that Aaron came up with it right then. Can AI come up with anything authentic sounding like that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • He must be an expert on this. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @03:54PM (#65727626)

    He must be an expert on this. After all, Reddit is 90% karma-farming bots reposting reposts of reposts.

    It's become nearly useless other than for narrowly-targeted searches of things one is interested in purchasing, or fixing, or whatnot.

    • Can confirm. Reddit has banned the real people.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )
        Doesn't help that everything I want to reply to is always archived.

        • Doesn't help that everything I want to reply to is always archived.

          Or the poster of the Helpful Thing deleted it all en-masse in protest of API changes or whatnot.

          I've found that ever since Reddit announced they're gonna let AI train on posts, I've stopped replying. Why feed the monster if I'm not getting paid to do so?

          I bet I'm not the only one that has stopped replying in Reddit and other fora because of this.

      • To be fair, real people are just the worst.

    • Not to mention that most older threads are full of since-deleted posts from back when they banned mobile apps and people left in protest.

    • It's become nearly useless other than for narrowly-targeted searches of things one is interested in purchasing, or fixing, or whatnot.

      So they provide useful information for your narrowly targeted interests?...and a FUCKTON of free porn?....so this is bad? You'd rather discuss politics with other assholes than pursue your hobbies, get the best produce purchasing advice I've ever seen and see every variant of boobies, nicely categorized by your specific tastes for free? You're the type of guy who dates a woman who's 10x hotter than he is, sexually insatiable, has the exact same favorite shows, music, and movies as you...but you're upset b

  • Time to go back (Score:3)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @04:14PM (#65727666)

    Time to go back to local bulletin board systems? I still have my Wildcat installation diskettes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      I sometimes wonder if going back to smaller enclaves with limited inter-connectivity (FidoNet/RelayNet for example) wouldn't be better for us than what we deal with today with global social media. Sure you would end up with lots of tiny echo chambers but at least their blast-radius on society at large would be greatly reduced. Sadly pretty sure that ship has sailed forever.

      • There are a lot of past their prime small forums out there with hundreds or thousands of users.
        They're quite nice.

      • The popularity of Discord proves you are on to something. Unfortunately discord's security is garbage just like their forced account verification system.
    • I remember dialing into my first one. Having the conversation with my parents about the long distance call cost in advance (nearest big city was approx 60mi away). Modem pools, busy signals. Love it OP, thanks for the nostalgia.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Sure. Do it!

    • Did we really ever need anything better than Ymodem-G? File transfers over http? No thanks!

  • Of course it is (Score:4, Insightful)

    by anoncoward69 ( 6496862 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @04:15PM (#65727672)
    To most people out there the "internet" is social media. Just like to a lot of people in the 90's AOL was "the internet"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tatsh ( 893946 )

      Reddit is a big part of killing the web. I remember the days of having many different forums I visited, all on different domains, and it was way better than now. I never needed all those communities to be on one site and in fact that makes those communities far more vulnerable, given the tracking, ads, and the possibility that Reddit decides to shut down your sub just because it feels like it. That is far more likely to happen compared to a VPS killing your service over some policy or how they feel about yo

  • ...since Reddit's full of them.

  • This CEO drank too much of his own CoolAid (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @04:44PM (#65727756)

    Reddit was already a brain dead lump of little dictators moderating their subreddit out of existence year ago.
    Anyone with a deviating opinion or even disliked by some moderators were booted from the platform.
    The internet is better off without Reddit.

  • It's been said for a bit now. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @04:47PM (#65727760)

    Neil DeGrasse Tyson even popped off something about how he sees the internet de-evolving into AIs slinging data at AIs and expects it to become nearly unusable for humans in the fairly near future. He expects humans to retreat back to books and other printed media in a few years. I somehow doubt that will happen for younger generations, but us old timers probably will as we watch the rest of the world continue to melt into the AI driver shitstorm of hallucination mixed with misinformation.

    • Re:It's been said for a bit now. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kellin ( 28417 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @05:22PM (#65727848)

      A data research company did a comprehensive study of a certain type of business model to find out how the generations perceive it and how to make it more interesting and financially attractive. The company I shill for used it to update their business model, but there was a detail in it that shocked everyone. One of the questions they asked was how individuals wanted business materials disseminated. The younger generations wanted physical media. Catalogs, etc. It was the older generations, like us GenX and Boomers that wanted everything digital. I think we'll be surprised to find that maybe, just maybe, hard copies will come back around as the younger generation tires of the digital world and longs for something more real.

      • God, I hope so. I'm sick of not being able to own anything.

        While we're at it, let's hope pinball will make a comeback.

        • It is in my corner of the world! A local restaurant put in two tables, just as a temporary attraction. That was about five years ago now, and they're still there, occasionally swapped out for other tables, as they found that they started making more and more money. Since then, I've discovered three more local places who have set up tables.

          Stern is still making some pretty nice new ones. Jaws is my favourite.
      • The fact that a newspaper/book/catalogue/whatever is printed does not infer human curation of the content. I think that, in the future, the deciding detail will be the date of publication (2022, the year ChatGPT came out). Since pretty much all printed material includes this information for copyright reasons, media printed before 2022 will become valued vintages.

    • Neil DeGrasse Tyson even popped off something about how he sees the internet de-evolving into AIs slinging data at AIs and expects it to become nearly unusable for humans in the fairly near future. He expects humans to retreat back to books and other printed media in a few years. I somehow doubt that will happen for younger generations, but us old timers probably will as we watch the rest of the world continue to melt into the AI driver shitstorm of hallucination mixed with misinformation.

      That last part is why even the younger generation will quit this bullshit too. Otherwise, who the hell is ever gonna hire a delusional liar filled with misinformation?

      At some point Trust and Honesty will be valued again among humans. It’s too fucking exhausting living any other way.

      • Neil DeGrasse Tyson even popped off something about how he sees the internet de-evolving into AIs slinging data at AIs and expects it to become nearly unusable for humans in the fairly near future. He expects humans to retreat back to books and other printed media in a few years. I somehow doubt that will happen for younger generations, but us old timers probably will as we watch the rest of the world continue to melt into the AI driver shitstorm of hallucination mixed with misinformation.

        That last part is why even the younger generation will quit this bullshit too. Otherwise, who the hell is ever gonna hire a delusional liar filled with misinformation?

        Voters?

  • Stay calm everyone (Score:3)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @05:03PM (#65727800)

    .. much of the Internet is now dead ..

    There is no way I am that lucky.

    Don't know about y'all but having me in the loop predetermines what the outcome can't be.

  • If only I had a world wide communications network that I could layer some decent services on, then I could replace the World Wide Web or Internet with my own idea!

    I think the problem that would face is a lack of users ready to buy things from the ads they click on. Which was the same problem we had in the first 20+ years of the Internet. Most people really didn't spend money on there if they could avoid it.

    The 1993-2023 Internet is definitely dead. But I don't think anyone should miss it or even care.
    The 19

    • Someone else commented that there are some smallish internet forums still kicking, and those are nice. I agree.

      I feel like your timeline needs another breakpoint for the pre-facebook post-1993 internet, when people still made individual websites or had their own blogs outside of major platforms. I remember some fun times on IRC in the mid 2000s.

      I think the problem that would face is a lack of users ready to buy things from the ads they click on. Which was the same problem we had in the first 20+ years of the Internet. Most people really didn't spend money on there if they could avoid it.

      How is this a problem? It sounds nice. I like what neocities [neocities.org] and nekoweb [nekoweb.org] are doing.

  • Accent (Score:4, Funny)

    by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @05:19PM (#65727838)

    Do the bots have a Philly accent?

  • Isn't that what the douchebag who bought it wanted to get rid of? So much for that. Oh wait, we know he's a liar like the big orange buffoon.

  • Those parts of the internet that are now dead because of AI...we don't miss those parts.

  • At first there was the indexers. Then the search engine. Then the bots. Then the social networks. Then the AI. Funny. There is always something lurking in the shadows, ready to scrape and index your data - or to accept your voluntarily provided data - and make you their product.

    I rather continue to host, block as much as I can the aforementioned tools, and use my own web services for things that are relevant to me and to those that care about me, than use a public service that will make me their product.

    Th

    • The problem really isn't even listeners. It is the pushers: bots, spam, political influencers (or just influencers, it's all marketing), marketing, fake people (ai), and finally trolls. I miss a good troll, unfortunately even an entertaining troll gets lost in all the bots and spam.

  • It is just the commercialized part that is going to shit.

    • If only it was as simple as blocking .com domains. It was a good idea until it wasn't even an idea any more.

  • This post has been brought to you by 3 pine trees and 1 mountain stream, vaporized.

Slashdot Top Deals

A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours. -- Milton Berle

Close