Alexis Ohanian, Reddit cofounder, told WIRED senior correspondent Lauren Goode at the inaugural WIRED World Fair that building social media apps is "not cool anymore." He said much of the internet has been compromised.
Ohanian said he expects "some better version of the group chat" to become the next form of user-generated content. He also said that the internet "was really built for humans first," and that "user interfaces and experiences are going to go away" because more of the internet will be built for AI agents than for people.
Ohanian 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, according to the report. He now runs venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, which the report says has over $1.3 billion in assets under management.
The report says Reddit has licensed its archive of human conversations to companies including Google and OpenAI to train AI models. Ohanian said, "Platforms like ours became very, very valuable to LLMs." The report also says Reddit shares fell 29 percent last week after the platform warned that Google's AI-powered search was hurting referral traffic.
Reddit recently said it would require users to sign in to fight third-party scraping and keep up engagement. Ohanian declined to say whether he agrees with the move. He said, "there has to be provable humanity on the internet without being creepy."