Reddit's co-founder says the future of online communities is the group chat

Alexis Ohanian, who co-founded Reddit, says the next home for online communities may be a better version of the group chat. Speaking at the first WIRED World Fair, he said he expects it to become the new form of user-generated content, the posts, reviews and advice that ordinary people write. His reason: he thinks much of the internet is now "compromised."

Why he thinks the internet is broken

Ohanian backs the "Dead Internet Theory," the idea that a lot of online activity and content is made by bots instead of people. He says large language models, the AI behind chatbots, have turbocharged this. AI agents, which are programs that act on a user's behalf, are now outrunning human users.

He argues the web is changing who it is built for. In his words, the internet he grew up on was built for humans first, but more of it will now be created for agents to use. He also says the internet has become so manipulated because manipulating it is so valuable.

Reddit's mixed position

AI has helped Reddit and hurt it. The company has licensed its huge archive of human conversations to Google and OpenAI to train AI models. Ohanian says platforms like Reddit became very valuable to these systems.

But Reddit shares fell 29 percent last week after the company warned that Google's AI-powered search was cutting referral traffic, meaning the visitors search sends to its pages. Reddit also said it will require users to sign in, to fight third-party scraping (automated copying of its content) and keep up engagement. Ohanian would not say whether he agrees. He did say there has to be "provable humanity on the internet without being creepy."

Where Ohanian stands now

Ohanian resigned from Reddit in 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, to make room for a Black board member and to push the company to reform its moderation. He now runs Seven Seven Six, a venture capital firm with over $1.3 billion in assets under management. It focuses on sports, where he sees real-life communities in an age of AI junk content.

He is still upbeat about AI. An early Anthropic investor, he is especially excited about possible medical breakthroughs. He also warned the technology could cause a lot of harm, and said builders must be sober about what they create.

What to do

• Treat anonymous reviews and advice with more caution, since some may come from bots.
• Lean on small circles and real people you know when judging products or advice.
• Look for signs a real person wrote a post, such as a history you can check.

What is not known yet

Ohanian gave no details on what a better group chat would look like, or whether he plans to build one. How Reddit will prove its users are human is also unclear.