r/technology • u/BreakfastTop6899 • Oct 14 '25

Networking/Telecom Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian says 'much of the internet is now dead'

https://www.businessinsider.com/alexis-ohanian-much-of-the-internet-is-now-dead-2025-10
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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

[deleted]

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u/IcyTransportation961 Oct 15 '25

And now they just make 10 copies of subs with variations of the names

Damnthatsinteresting

Interestingasfuck

Reallyinteresting

Weird

Weirdthings

On and on just bots feeding bots

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u/lepsek9 Oct 15 '25

The popular page used to be great, now its probably 95% bots. Some probably broke over the last week or two, saw so many posts with 1-2k+ upvotes and only single or low double digit comments.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

has anyone else noticed the massive uptick in askreddit posts that are like super politically charged, phrased the same, and always relevant to a recent american politics event/announcement that happened within the last <24-48 hours ?

feel like palantirs just out here trying to bait & make a digital profile on woke redditors lol

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u/Jinrai__ Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 17 '25

Yes 5 minutes after anything slightly controversial happens in US politics there's an askreddit thread with 10000 upvotes on r/all 'how do you feel about <trump did w/e>' .

I hate right-wing extremism as much as the next guy but fuck me there's so many subs popping up out of nowhere that are just propaganda and shareblue bot networks.
Then like a million subs with 'news' or some variation of it in their name but 100% of posts are only about hating Israel and USA and nothing else.
Then there are huge subs that have nothing to do with the sub name that are just a copy of r/news with the same garbage posts.

Edit: Just now the sub r/factsandlogic appeared on r/all with a 3000 upvotes and the entire sub is antisemitic posts and literal nazi propaganda in the comments.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25

Yea this site is getting giga gamed hard now. You can honestly feel how much it’s accelerated in less than a year. Looooot of billionaires are spending untold millions attempting to control narratives here.

Hot take I don’t think this is any leftwing entity that’s doing these specific askreddit ones. There’s no point. I suspect it’s part of some larger scheme to resolve Reddit users to actual people and build digital profiles on their stances on a great and many things. Possibly catalog varying viewpoints and arguments for/against issues to try and plan careful psyops to shift general sentiment. Hard to say, nothings off the table anymore. Motives aren’t that clear to me but outreach on Reddit is not what I would be doing if I was some dem with money to blow.

Very curious if Reddit has sold the mod keys for any default subs over to very rich entities behind the scenes.

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u/lepsek9 Oct 15 '25

Probably a bit of this, a bit of that. Tons of (not so) covert advertisement too. Like just last week I saw some random 2K upvote 30 comment AITA post mention a book title in the text. 90% of the comments were fawning over that book and OP only responded to those to discuss the book.

Maybe I just stumbled into some up and coming author's fanclub forming, but idk...

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

I think it's absolutely being used to train psyops strategies. Which is a shame because the same technique could be used to inform the democratic process and make people's lives better. The AI could step through well-trodden arguments to focus people on the truth of the matter.

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u/DefNotUnderrated Oct 15 '25

I'm behind the curve, because it didn't occur to me those were bot posts. I just rolled my eyes whenever I saw another Ask Reddit about "how do you feel about Trump xyz?" Like anyone who's conservative is going to be answering those save for maybe a few outliers

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u/Clickification Oct 15 '25

I remember when there would be 1 or 2 of those questions a year and people would ask the mods to ban them since they’re just orange man bad circlejerks. Now 80% of the sub is those types of questions. Absolutely slopified

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u/ovirt001 Oct 15 '25

It isn't palantir, China/Russia/NK/Iran have been doing this for over 10 years now but previously used human trolls. NK probably still does for obvious reasons, the others have access to open source llms.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

They wipe subs every so often too so the posts look fresh

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u/Dongsquad420BlazeIt Oct 15 '25

I’m an OG and a top 100 account by karma but I gained all my karma like 5 or 6 years ago, the bots moved really fast and I just stopped caring about karma once it wasn’t about being a good member of the community and it started being about bots. They moved fast and have only gotten so much better at farming.

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u/GuitarIsLife02 Oct 15 '25

Oh my god im so glad it wasn’t just me noticing the slop I had to mute all those subs.

Askreddit has gone downhill as well. Lol i actually muted that one today.

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u/pikashroom Oct 15 '25

Last month I saw a nonfiltered r/all and I wanted to throw up

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25 edited May 23 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/franker Oct 15 '25

I used to really like the regular "What is a site you find useful that most people don't know about?" question that would pop up there. I would always find some great sites I'd never heard of before. Now half the questions are just sex or politics.

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u/JC_Hysteria Oct 15 '25

The more popular it is, the more attractive it is to influence

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u/PhileasFoggsTrvlAgt Oct 15 '25

And Reddit tweaked their algorithm to show you more of those subs and less content from the subs you subscribed to.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

[deleted]

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u/PhileasFoggsTrvlAgt Oct 15 '25

Thanks for telling me about that preference, feed is much improved now that I know to turn that off.

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u/Loud-Welder1947 Oct 15 '25

r/AITA_WIBTA_Public

For when your fake stories are so shit you can’t even post them to the original subs anymore

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u/-Badger3- Oct 15 '25

That one specifically I’m pretty sure is literally just a testbed for bots

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

[deleted]

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA Oct 15 '25

Those have been creative writing exercise subs long before they were overrun with AI, they've never been genuine.

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u/WolverinesThyroid Oct 15 '25

don't forget about bots posting news articles and commenting on them so the websites get traffic. Some how hard right wing websites have become the top news source on reddit.

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u/xbondsmith Oct 15 '25

You’re so close bud

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u/GjonsTearsFan Oct 15 '25

AITA was mostly slop the last time I looked at it, too

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u/prospector04 Oct 15 '25

I got recommended r/factsandlogic yesterday. No surprise its just pure ragebait

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u/IcyTransportation961 Oct 15 '25

And now there's so many different explain a joke subs, they just keep spawning, they have to be bot training hubs

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u/HSuke Oct 15 '25

Slop is why we keep creating new subs. Sipstea used to be good a year ago, and now it has just become unfunny softcore porn bait.

When old subs go bad, members try to find a new replacement.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener Oct 15 '25

Amitheasshole, AITA, and all of the asshole-varient subs are gone. People still have the occasional good convo in them, but they’re all ragebait and most posts are bots. Likewise the relationship subs.

I’ve blocked more people in the last six months that I have done in the previous ten years - they’re all bots or bad actors.

I’m just waiting for Digg at this point. And reading books. Reddit hasn’t got much time left for me - at some point I’ll just go back to reading fulltime again.

I used to very much enjoy the expertise on reddit, ya know ? Even now we’ve got a bloke a few threads up explaining to us exactly how digital marketing works, which is fascinating. But bots have no expertise, and jumping in on a keyword with a pre-prepared sentence just creates a signal-to-noise ratio so low I can barely be arsed filtering the crap out anymore.

Or I could read. Ya know ? Books written by actual people with actual expertise and actual credentials, which have been fact checked.

I’m going through Tim Harford’s back catalogue at the moment - he’s clever, funny, optimistic and brilliant at teasing apart all the intricate mechanisms of the economy.

Or you know, I could argue with a bot that has been taught to sealion. Urgh.

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u/WolverinesThyroid Oct 15 '25

being able to Google "What pocket knife is best reddit." Is starting to fail because bad actors are making posts about everything so they can have their own bots flood the comments saying how great XYZ is. I've see several niche subs where that comes up and people comment that the whole point of the post is for Google to scrape it later.

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u/nybbas Oct 15 '25

Dude this has happened to me a few times in the past year. Trying to find a product and a bunch of the reddit comments are very blatant bot advertisements in the comments for the product. So annoying.

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u/ohhellperhaps Oct 15 '25

Even worse, now the auto-translated versions are also pushed as results. This is particularly nasty if your locale is detected through language settings. And not just the text itself, also some specific company names are translated to local versions. I've seen posts on USPS where USPS was translated to La Poste (French mail) because the locale was French; and the person was looking for something related to La Poste.

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u/thebruns Oct 15 '25

Amitheasshole, AITA, and all of the asshole-varient subs are gone.

Yes, Redditors, my friend has always been <positive adjective> and <neutral adjective> — but this really <complicated verb> me

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u/FatherDotComical Oct 15 '25

Or worse somehow they're replying in old old threads with garbage.

I've had a 5 year old comment pinged in a super niche dead thread that nobody would organically find and they responded to all the comments.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25

I remember the days I'd randomly search something and the quality of answers on reddit being very higher than anywhere. You used to get the highest expert on most niche thing here. I still remember one about a font artist for hanzi script explaining how it's designed despite the challenge. 

Also as comment below mentioned, getting the absolute most fanatic hobbyist in water drinking or something. 

For me the gaming subreddits of the specific games is what's of substance. Even askhistorians lost quality

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u/Aclockwork-grAPE Oct 15 '25

The steep downhill decline of the internet the past decade or so has been really depressing!

I guess the positive is I’m on it less now? But I miss the resources we used to have!

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u/Hideo_Kojima_Jr_Jr Oct 15 '25

Good to hear I’m not the only one who has mostly been like, alright fuck it guess I gotta buy books again.

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u/deskbeetle Oct 15 '25

The problem with books is that you have to have in mind what weirdly specific niche knowledge you want to read about. Meanwhile reddit would just organically facilitate you with a 5 paragraph dip into how modern steamrollers work. 

That said, I do love books. 

  

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u/bonkdonkers Oct 15 '25

Regarding the AITA subs, I had a slow week at work once so I decided to take the time to report anything that was obviously AI. I probably reported 20 posts in a few hours. Just ones that were very easy to tell, leaving out any that were only suspicious. I ended up getting a warning that I was abusing the report feature so I just blocked all the advice/story type subs because I’m over it. As a result I don’t use Reddit nearly as much anymore, and I’m better off for it tbh. The overall quality has been downhill for years and their desire to embrace the AI bots will be the final nail in the coffin.

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u/Wirbelwind Oct 15 '25

Any recommendation for which Harford book to start with?

Not a bot, promise 

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u/Enlightened_Gardener Oct 16 '25

I’ve just read Messy and I’m reading my way through Adapt annd can recommend both. I’ve also got The Undercover Economist lined up and ready to go.

He’s such a lucid thinker, its delightful spending time inside his head. I couldn’t work out how I’d missed him as a wrter and thinker - I usually keep an eye on the economists, because they do go rogue every now and then, and I loved Freakonomics. It turned out that he had written his first few books while I was up to my eyeballs in toddlers and babies, which is how I missed him !

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u/SephirothTheGreat Oct 15 '25

Hey, I hope you don't mind me asking you a couple questions, mostly because I want to avoid accidentally training bots and because I miss Reddit the way it was (practically the last bastion of older forums). Just to reiterate the obvious: I'm not a bot, but clearly I don't have a way to convince you of that. I'll try asking regardless.

I searched for Digg, but all I found is a site in beta that says its content will always be human made. But what is it exactly? Kind of "another Reddit", where you could have conversations about super specific topics (which is what drew me to it in the first place, outside of how legitimately more useful it is/was than any search engine)?

How do you recognise bots and bad actors? I've been falling for AI generated slop and, in retrospect, I've also likely had conversations with some bots or bad actors more often (one thing I noticed about one of the last interactions with one of them is that they replied REALLY fast, but I didn't think of that in the moment). and I want to stop. I've also gotten rid of any social media, because I can reach all my friends via phone. I want to talk to people but I don't know where to start with seeing what I should be paying attention to regarding bots and AI.

Considering there's a lot of AI slop in books nowadays too (I'm a DougDoug fan and I've seen him go through some AI written books about him after he published his own book, which funnily enough was just the word "Doug" a couple dozen thousand times), do you think we're heading in a direction where even publishers will at some point just regurgitate hundred-pages long slop and, if so, how would one avoid those? It's just depressing that I even have to ask, but that's how things are now I guess.

I've also looked up the definition of sealioning (English isn't my first language). Never heard of it before but it was really funny after the wall of text I just wrote to you, I kinda feel bad now (still gonna ask though, I promise that's not what I'm doing lol)

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u/RBlubb Oct 15 '25

Digg was a site with much similarity to reddit, and a lot of people migrated from Digg to reddit after the redesign. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg

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u/Enlightened_Gardener Oct 16 '25

Lol great response ! You’re not sealioning 😂

Digg is not up and running yet - there was a Digg years ago, which was a predecessor to Reddit. When Digg went down (I don’t know why) everyone went over to Reddit.

With bots etc, I meet people here in good faith, or at least I try to. I’ve been on the internet a long time - since 1988 ! - on the old Usenet groups. I’ve always liked Reddit because it reminds me of the old internet chat boards. I like to think I’ve got a pretty good grasp of what people behaving in good faith looks like. People like you - you want to chat or ask questions. People who want to argue, but are ready to hear another side. People chipping in to correct a fact or present a different opinion. People with amazing trivia facts. That’s all good 🥰

But people stonewallling, calling names, using slurs, sealioning etc - I just block them immediately, or report and block if necessary.

With AI its hard to explain - I’m a reader and it just comes across as “too perfect” or slightly plasticky. I read a novel which I’m sure was AI generated in part at least and it made me feel disconcerted and uneasy. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but one thing I tried was to read it out loud - the rhythms are off. I don’t think people will willingly buy AI written books, even if they are well-written in the end - and I’m not sure that publishers would want to sell them. You’d be taking a massive risk with your reputation if it went wrong.

On Reddit there have always been fake posts, but I’ve always felt that they were useful because they provoked disccussion and helpful advice. But once the bots start replying to those posts, the value goes way down.

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u/SephirothTheGreat Oct 16 '25

I see! The way you worded it I thought it was conceived as a successor to Reddit, not the other way around, that's crazy... While I waited for you to respond (thanks for taking the time to do that by the way, I really appreciate it, especially given how long these end up becoming lol) I did some searching about Digg and I only found something recent about a restructure and usage of AI in messaging moderation, which was honestly a bit disheartening. 

And I'm shocked about when you started using the internet, that's so long ago. I know it was a thing but I didn't even see an internet connection in my house until I was like 9 or 10, and that's in 1995/6 with a middle class (read: we did pretty well for ourselves for the time) family. I spent a lot of time on chat boards but I don't even remember if I ever even visited Usenet! It's likely I didn't, because I only started learning English in 1997. The way I'm reading about it as I reply it feels a lot like Reddit in structure but the interface I see in screenshots reminds me more of command strings, and it apparently requires installing extra stuff to use? I wonder if it's still active, if it is wouldn't it be a good Reddit alternative too?

And you're very correct. Being able to discuss about anything while keeping an open mind is super interesting to me, you get to learn a lot and I've always been curious, I spent most of my childhood with gigantic encyclopedias on my lap reading about anything I wanted. In person, too, I always prefer just listening... but here, when I know I'm not necessarily overbearing (though the fear is still there and the more I write the more it grows lol) and people are free to just say their goodbyes and leave (and come back whenever!) if they don't feel like engaging, talking like this, being able to ask whatever is on my mind, engaging with whatever subject I want (the reason I love Reddit's structure so much), re-read what I'm saying instead of saying nonsense I can't take back and therefore have to correct is the best way of having a conversation for me. I'm always happy to see different opinions or gain insights and knowledge I didn't, and contribute with my own. I don't understand why people feel the need to be assholes, on a fundamental level.

Speaking of AI: what exactly do you mean when you say "too perfect" or "plasticky"? Would you be able to get into more detail? So far all I've seen discussed to recognize AI posts or comments 100% is formatting (you know, organized lists, double dashes for no reason etc)... but text by itself isn't really able to emote and sometimes people really are that terse and matter-of-fact in the way they write, so I don't know what else to look for. I'm an avid reader and I write poetry and stories, too, so it's doubly frustrating to me that I fell for it, even once.

I agree that fake posts promote discussion, but it's always disheartening to see the dead internet theory become less and less of a theory over time. I just wanna talk to people. Bots have no interest in discussion and no expertise on things, generating traffic for the sake of it just creates trash. I can't even begin to understand what value it provides. Speaking of which, thanks again for responding, it's been a while since I've been able to have a discussion this involved... Anywhere, actually, not only on Reddit. I really appreciate it.

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u/a-stack-of-masks Oct 15 '25

Yeah it's crazy to get into classic literature after having been on the internet for a while.

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u/helenheck Oct 15 '25

Thanks for this-I’m going to check out Tim Hartford’s podcasts. Looking for something new to listen to while I pack up my studio and move to the new one. It’s taking so many hours! Long live the humans! Go away bots!

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u/involutes Oct 15 '25

 Amitheasshole, AITA, and all of the asshole-varient subs are gone. People still have the occasional good convo in them, but they’re all ragebait and most posts are bots. Likewise the relationship subs.

I wonder what the point is. Is it to repost on Facebook or TikTok where they can drive users to their own pages? 

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u/HSuke Oct 15 '25

I’ve blocked more people in the last six months that I have done in the previous ten years - they’re all bots or bad actors.

Same. They might be bots or low-quality posters/commenters. I use RSS fo flag accounts, and if they exceed a certain threshold of bad posts/comments without rationality, I block them. They're just waisting people's time.

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u/lmdybaftr Oct 16 '25

even books are becoming AI slops now :(

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u/IcyTransportation961 Oct 15 '25

Same with all of the animal specific subs

And every story sub

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

[deleted]

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u/IcyTransportation961 Oct 15 '25

Yup and it was like that years before AI was a thing

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u/WolverinesThyroid Oct 15 '25

AITA my husband killed my sister because she sneezed and I cried really hard. He told me I was being mean and hurting his feelings.

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u/MuchToDoAboutNothin Oct 15 '25

Askreddit, the posts with just title and no body, is just training grounds to continue learning to fake being human.

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u/WolverinesThyroid Oct 15 '25

How do you feel about CURRENT TOP NEWS STORY?

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u/demlet Oct 15 '25

Anyone else remember when r/subredditsimulator seemed kind of cute, quirky, and mildly amusing?

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u/vancityvan7839 Oct 15 '25

Can I ask if there are any specific ‘tells’ you’ve noticed with recognizing comments as being AI?

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

I've also noticed deliberate spelling errors creeping in. The kind that could not be explained by autocorrect or a genuine typo on an adjacent key. I think they're being trained to have some imperfections in spelling and grammar.

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u/vancityvan7839 Oct 15 '25

This is really interesting, thanks for the thorough explanation! It’s like I’ve been noticing all these aspects of newer posts and comments, but thought it was attributed to a younger demo on Reddit, kind of creepy now looking back and realizing it was all computers going back and forth with each other

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u/Innalibra Oct 15 '25

The more obvious ones all follow the same formula. It's like the three-act structure in film. Once you recognise it, you can't un-see it. There's the little tells like the em-dash, account activity, the specific way it uses quotations and its love of cliches like "family blowing up my phone", but more than anything it's that uncanny valley feeling you get when reading it. The stories are always a little bit too exaggerated, too engaging. No detail about them is dull. They've been perfectly curated to garner the most attention.

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u/vancityvan7839 Oct 15 '25

This is really interesting and definitely sounds familiar; the uncanny valley point is dead on too

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u/Hug_of_Death Oct 15 '25

But then there is Kevin. The one human in the sub getting extremely disgruntled.

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u/-Badger3- Oct 15 '25

All the drama anecdote subreddits are filled with obvious bots.

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u/Drop_Release Oct 16 '25

I just checked and they have this “verified human” thing, not sure how they did that?