Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Says 'So Much of the Internet Is Dead' Amid Bot and AI-Slop Surge
October 2025
In October 2025, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian publicly endorsed the 'dead internet' framing, saying much of the web is now botted, 'quasi-AI,' and 'LinkedIn slop' — a striking concession from a founder of a platform central to those concerns.
What happened
On October 15, 2025, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, speaking on the TBPN podcast, said that 'so much of the internet is now just dead — this whole dead internet theory,' describing today's web as 'whether it's botted, whether it's quasi-AI, LinkedIn slop.' The 'dead internet theory' holds, in its weaker form, that bots and AI-generated content increasingly dominate online discourse; by 2024–2025 the phrase was widely used to describe the observable flood of LLM-generated content across major platforms.
Ohanian argued that verifiable human presence — 'proof of life,' live viewers, real-time content — had become newly valuable precisely because so much engagement is now synthetic, and suggested authentic conversation had migrated to private group chats. Coming from a co-founder of Reddit, whose user-generated content is now licensed to power AI models and is a prime target for AI-generated spam, the remarks were notable as an insider acknowledgment of the authenticity crisis facing the platform.
The comments fed directly into ongoing 2024–2026 concerns about bot networks, AI-generated posts, and manipulation of Reddit content for downstream AI systems, lending high-profile credibility to fears that Reddit's core asset — human-generated discussion — is being diluted.
Impact
A Reddit co-founder publicly validated 'dead internet' concerns about bots and AI slop, amplifying mainstream debate over the authenticity of Reddit and other platforms whose content increasingly feeds, and is faked for, AI systems.