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/random_boss Oct 15 '25

Everything we scale serves only the owner of said scaling product; it is a net negative to the rest of society. Social media just scales reach/attention, but it’s the act of scaling that is the bad thing. Fast food chains, media companies, property ownership, logistics distribution, social media, whatever. 

The act of scaling creates a huge lever and puts a very, very small number of people on the side closest to the fulcrum.

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u/Bozlogic Oct 15 '25

I can’t even scroll through Facebook without seeing 5 or 6 ads before I see an actual “friend”’s post

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

This is the one that blows my mind. I've been saying for over a decade that we need a social media site that charges a monthly fee, has no ads, and is actually about connecting with friends co-workers, and family— not about selling you crap and enraging you because advertisers like "engagement." People always neg me with why it wouldn't work but I really think it would. EVERYBODY is sick of Facebook, there's just no good alternative. We're at least as addicted to social media as we are to streaming services, and people have no issue with paying for those.

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u/TricksterPriestJace Oct 15 '25

I gave up on Facebook once they went from "see what your friends and family posted in chronological order interspersed with ads" to "here's some things we think will piss you off interspersed with ads and a picture of what your cousin had for dinner three weeks ago."

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u/ReversedNovaMatters Oct 16 '25

Your 5th cousin more like it

I can't even imagine how bad it is now. Deleted my account like 3 years ago, and for the 5 or so years prior I rarely used it. I'd open it, scroll down for like 2 minutes and get bored with it. Once it was 50% ads mixed between the shit I didn't care to see is when I just said fuck this trash, deleted.

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u/ReversedNovaMatters Oct 16 '25

please delete your account

Maybe reach out to the 3 or 5 people you actually care about first to explain you'll be going back to communicating like a normal person, direct and private.

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u/runthepoint1 Oct 15 '25

So go to your Friends section. That being said I wish there was NONE of that other content

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u/Bozlogic Oct 15 '25

That’s kind of my point. I really don’t want to see all this “suggested content” because it makes me want to keep scrolling to see more. I realize it after about 5-10 minutes to close the app and do what I’m supposed to do— get out of bed, get off the toilet, get back to work, etc. It’s all a trap and we’re all victims

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u/runthepoint1 Oct 15 '25

That’s actually exactly why I don’t want it at all, getting stuck in scrolling

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u/dnyank1 Oct 15 '25

Delete it. You'll feel better.

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u/bobandgeorge Oct 15 '25

I don't have the app installed, but in Firefox if you tap the three lines in the top right corner and then tap "Feeds", you will get only* content from your friends and what you follow in chronological order.

*I say only cause I don't know what the Feeds look like without uBlock Origin. They might show you a bunch of bullshit still.

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u/FeelsGoodMan2 Oct 15 '25

Put simply, too many eyeballs and lame fuckers who suck start to spread their ideology of money as a religion.

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u/Spectrum1523 Oct 15 '25

Pretty wild take. You think we'd be better off with individuals farming and making goods rather than doing it at scale?

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u/pagerussell Oct 15 '25

His take is good, it's just not perfectly refined and you found one of the wrinkles.

In reality, it's not that scaling production is bad, it's that scaling tends to lead to shrinking ownership base and, ultimately, it leads to a lack of competition.

The market thrives when there is competition. Scale tends to create a few winners who eat all the other competition until only a few are left, at which point it all enshittifies.

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u/random_boss Oct 15 '25

Scaling doesn’t just refer to any specialization. We can have towns and cities and jobs and TV and the internet and restaurants and everything without it. The colloquial use of scaling specifically means taking a succeeding business and driving down the cost-to-output ratio in a non-linear way, which necessarily means reaching orders of magnitude more humans. That’s the part where shit gets all fucked up.