Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian says the internet is being rebuilt for agents, not people

Alexis Ohanian helped build one of the internet's biggest human conversations. Now he thinks the web is turning into something built for machines. Speaking at the WIRED World Fair, the Reddit co-founder said building social media apps is "not cool anymore" and much of the internet is compromised, Isabella Ward reports for WIRED.

The dead internet

Ohanian subscribes to the Dead Internet Theory, the idea that much online activity and content comes from bots, and says language models have supercharged it, with agents outpacing human users. The internet he grew up on was built for humans first, he said; interfaces designed for people will fade as more of the web is built for agents to use instead.

He expects the next form of user-generated content to be some better version of the group chat. His venture firm, Seven Seven Six, with over $1.3 billion under management, focuses on sports, where he sees real communities in "the age of AI slop."

Reddit's double bind

AI has been lucrative for Reddit, which licenses its archive of human conversation to Google and OpenAI for training. "Platforms like ours became very, very valuable to LLMs," Ohanian said. It also hurts: Reddit shares fell 29% last week after the company warned that Google's AI search was cutting referral traffic. And because those conversations are so valuable, he says, they're increasingly manipulated.

Reddit now requires sign-in to fight scraping. Ohanian wouldn't say whether he agrees, but said "there has to be provable humanity on the internet without being creepy."

Still an optimist

He's an early Anthropic investor and is excited about AI's potential for medical breakthroughs, while acknowledging the technology could do real harm and urging people to be sober about how it's built.

For developers, his prediction is worth taking seriously: if more traffic comes from agents, the "user" you design for may increasingly be software. Clean APIs and machine-readable structure stop being nice-to-haves.

Scoreboard update: AI +1. A founder of the human internet says it's being rebuilt for AI agents.

Stay undead.