Reddit Founder Says Building Social Media Apps Is 'Not Cool Anymore' (wired.com) 43
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: 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 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 commercialization 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."
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 commercialization 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."
The Organic Internet (Score:3, Interesting)
"The internet that I grew up on that was really built for humans first.."
Sure. But you're staring at why dead internet isn't merely a theory.
Said it yourself. You grew up.
Even if there wasn't a single bot in existence and no AI threat anywhere online, the half-century old internet would mirror reality. Humans grow up. They get old. And they die.
Facebook, is now the worlds largest digital graveyard. That isn't shocking. It's expected.
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I remember pre 9/11 4chan and slashdot. I miss the wildwest experience. I miss the invasion boards..
I too miss the alt.binaries.old_times.
..I'm not sure how you can keep Reddit fresh and alive.
Guess that depends. Is profit part of that life-sustaining maintenance now? Greed is pretty boring at parties. Always wants more of one thing, too easy to predict, self-serving, and those fucking ads? I asked how to remove a hose clamp. No, I don't need a titty twister drink in tangerine tulip flavor that comes with free nipple clamps with that.
Re: The Organic Internet (Score:4, Insightful)
Many forums died the facebook death, and now people have figured out that doomscrolling facebook isn't givong them anything.
And when you are on youtube it starts to feel like it's now running on fumes with low octane fuel due to all the emotionless massproduced videos. You can still find channels with real substance there that are worth holding on to but they run the risk of getting drowned and some are leeched by scammers stealing their content while youtube does nothing to stem that.
Re: The Organic Internet (Score:2)
The internet definitely was a way cooler and greater place before it was completely swarmed by the normies and then entrenched by the weirdest attempts of regulations, yep.
Long Overdue (Score:5, Interesting)
I got involved in social media for politics starting in 2008. Things were "as bad as it gets" toxic in terms of 4chan cretins by 2010 and by 2012 there were obvious signs of nation state activity. Now, eighteen years after I started, I've got a precedent setting 1st Amendment case with my name on it, I live in this weird little protective program California offers, since one of my codefendants was murdered, and that case remains unsolved. If you Google "Rauhauser vs. McGibney" you'll find an endless rabbit hole excavated by clever hackers & lawyers vs. judicial corruption in Texas. I'm easily reached online if you'd like to see the affidavit from an FBI agent about McGibney being an informant. And this all flowed entirely from Twitter slap fights.
These days I've got a Twitter account again, briefly, because I want just one phone call with 420chan founder Aubrey Cottle, now that he's out of prison for the hit he did on the Texas GOP back in 2021. It's just NealR in hex, come on Kirt, gimme a ring :-)
And once that call is done I go back to the ONLY place I engage online - Reddit. I do get the occasional precocious windowlicker every now and then, but mostly it's got health related information, and a good supply of cat photos.
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You should have seen the Yahoo! boards in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine. The rusbots were everywhere defending the invasion, talking about how WWIII was right around the corner if Ukraine was helped defend itself, how Russia has nuclear weapons (that trope is still ongoing) and so on.
Nation state activity doesn't get more blatant than that.
The Incentives Don't Align (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been long proven that outrage gets more traction on the internet than positivity...really, it predates the internet; nightly news stories have led with rage bait for decades.
The existing social media platforms have gotten to the point where everyone is outraged about something - whether it's The Orange Man or The Illegals or The Guns or The Abortions or The Terrible Men or The Terrible Women...and even if we somehow managed to make a new social media platform, tomorrow, that was 100% bot/AI free and exclusively human-made content with no import of content from existing social networks, all the Chronically Online humans would bring their rage about those issues with them to the platform.
The solution, then, is highly restrictive moderation to keep the outrage out of the space. Many vBulletin-style bulletin boards did exactly that to keep users on topic throughout the 2000s and 2010s...but such a heavy-handed moderation system requires dedicated moderators and a group of people who generally agree with the moderation for the sake of group cohesion on the topic. A general-purpose social network would find the required amount of moderation prohibitive. Reddit's moderation requirements basically meant that anyone who was successful at being a moderator, was commonly a Chronically Online person who isn't great at separating disagreement from justified moderation.
So, yes, any new social network, save for maybe a Mastodon server of known friends or an extension of an in-real-life social club, is going to speedrun itself into the flame wars and spam that made Usenet fall out of favor. Personally, I think that it's a result of the removal of the online/offline paradigm of dial-up internet - when there were limits on time and connectivity, it helped keep some distance between our Internet Selves and our Real Selves. Once the internet was always online and in our pocket all the time, there was no stop-and-think, it was just an outlet for every impulse. Any new social network will inherit that problem.
Re:The Incentives Don't Align (Score:5, Interesting)
Twitter/X has really ramped the outrage machine up to 11 since now they pay users for engagement which only created a feedback cycle of having users to engagement bait with outrageous/obvious questions and controversial statements and clips. Pay X for verification, pay X to make larger posts, pay X to get priority on the algorithm and X pays you to get views and replies, good or bad doesn't matter, just keep the machine moving.
Something I have heard proposed that is an interesting proposal is to change Section 230 so that if you operate a "For You" algorithmic page for users you don't have liability protection for what users get fed on that page.
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Your algo is better than mine it seems I see some truly abhorrent shit on X and I don't even really use it all that much.
The most infuriating is the "let me ask an obvious/inflammatory question" to bait a bunch of answers, literally just to farm a few cents per comment, putting the work in down in the mines.
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You cannot moderate out all outrage inducing stuff without turning your conversation into an echo chamber where actual discussion literally isn't allowed, only parroting the moderators' opinions. The reason for that is that there is no possible objective definition of outrage. What outrages you is simple, factual truth to someone else, and what outrages them is the center of your world view and beyond question. That is human nature.
The internet has always reflected this reality, even before it was opened up
welcome to eternal winter (Score:1)
replying anon because of modding. you pretty much sum it up but i'd point out one thing:
flame wars and spam that made Usenet fall out of favor.
it probably would have, but usenet never even really got big enough for that massification to take place and become the real reason for its fading away.
flames were ofc part of the discussion, sometimes even fun, but the worse effects more often than not mitigated by the "don't feed the trolls" and "netiquette" or "plonk" attitudes provided by some degree of cohesion. so, self moderation. it was, after all, a nerds gathe
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"It's been long proven that outrage gets more traction on the internet than positivity...really, it predates the internet; nightly news stories have led with rage bait for decades."
Kiddo, there's been rage bait for as long as there's been anything resembling mass media, if not longer. Let me tell you about Catholic and Protestant pamphleteers in the 16th century.
'If it bleeds it leads...' (Score:2)
Was/Is the old adage many newspapers and new stations followed pre-internet. While not the exact same as rage baiting, it was the idea that something horrific, dramatic or negative would garner more attention than some old boring 'regular' or 'heart-warming' news story. We are a sad species...
We need to develop one universal social media app (Score:4, Funny)
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that covers everyone's use cases!
(T. He Internet) "C'mon now! I even got the latest Vee6 facelift so they can jump right on me! Look, I know Dee Enness isn't much to look at these days, but she's a battle axe that still gets the job done. You sure didn't seem to mind hitting it last night. Twice."
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They've all pretty much converged into being same thing so the choice is more what colour you prefer for the logo.
Because it was exposed. (Score:2)
After being exposed a merely a method of gathering data about users, yeah, people didn't think that was cool.
This problem existed before LLM were everywhere, you keep trying build platforms that turn a profit off of users and that's the problem.
"Theory"? (Score:3)
That most Internet traffic is spam? FACT.
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I think it's posited similar to the theory of gravity.
just another ignoramus (Score:3)
"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."
So he's no better than all the other rich talking heads promoting their interests. There is a huge difference between AI itself and the agents designed to do damaging things. He cites the potential for medical breakthroughs, sure that's AI, then cites causing harm, but that's not AI but rather agents capable of harm. These are different things, that needs to be taught to this guy, after all his achievement was reddit, a me-too social media platform started by the same people as started Digg and only successful because Digg went down for being so corrupt.
Please don't build a replacement (Score:2)
Your job isn't to be "cool". (Score:4, Interesting)
As for the bot problem - NGL, it's pretty bad, but Reddit allows it to continue. Any mod of more than one sub could trivially provide a long list of bots, yet is that ever acted on outside their own subs? No, because data collection is the entire purpose of Reddit-The-Company. Every single "improvement" they've made this year had nothing to do with user preference or reducing bots, they just want to make sure the right bots (the ones paying them) win.
So yeah, Spez can retire now, thanks. He's managed to destroy one of the top 10 sites on the internet just in the past six months.
Economics always wins (Score:3)
Professionally moderated, ethical and law-abiding social media is about as profitable as liquidating all your assets, taking the resulting cash, soaking it in gasoline, and lighting it on fire.
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ya, by "not cool" he means the money has gone elsewhere, rather than the traditional fun sense.
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Of course it's not cool (Score:1)
AI lets any cretin who can click a mouse shit out a social media app in 5 minutes.
Licensing needs. (Score:2)
According to the Reddit cofounder, building social media apps is "not cool anymore" and so much of the internet has been compromised.
So "compromised" is what we're going to call it now? Has the Reddit founder ever considered asking what exactly would make Reddit, cool again? Remove all the AI? Check. Limit advertising? Well, OK, but something's gotta pay the bills. Anonymous posting? Well..now we're starting to get somewhere.
Anyone considered the annoying-as-fuck TROLL problem yet?
Building social media apps isn't cool anymore because the instant you fire one up it gets overrun with troll behavior. For fucks, shits, and trolls sak
Re: Licensing needs. (Score:2)
"Anyone considered the annoying-as-fuck TROLL problem yet?"
B!zX saw it and decided to make sure to keep them here with the AC checkbox.
It is not cool to be login only (Score:3, Insightful)
Ohhh, you made your site inaccessible without login and people are still not installing your crappy app? Who could have known that.
"The internet that I grew up on that was really bu (Score:2)
Then why did he and Kevin Rose trying to reboot Digg.com as a platform for shills and bots? They rebooted the platform, they deliberately courted trolls and spammers (Ohanian bragged about personally inviting the Wall Street Bets guys from Reddit over to New Digg) and banned users that complained about it. At one point the platform banned all references to Jeffrey Epstein, as the files were being released, and then started banning any
Reap what ye sow (Score:2)
"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..."
Surely the leopards won't eat MY face.
reddit aint cool (Score:2)
reddit has not been cool for a very long time already, so I guess it takes a not-cool corpo to identify what is not cool anymore.
No change in temperature (Score:3)