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.
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