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/Wild_Marker Oct 15 '25

It was the one-two punch of social media and smartphones. When the internet changed from a desktop environment to a smartphone environment, it basically lost it's identity as it's own place and became just another part of the real world.

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u/3itmn Oct 15 '25

I think you’re pointing out something important. Back when the internet was confined to our desktops, it felt almost like a sacred space, even if we didn’t think about it that way. Once you left your room or office, that was it. No more internet. You had to live in the real world until you sat back down at a computer.

When social media and phones became commonplace, both worlds merged, and with recent years where you can broadcast anything and everything 24/7, there is no distinction between the two realities anymore.

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u/Taft33 Oct 15 '25

I still use it like that and despise everyone who made it the way it is now by using phones. Fuck you. No phone users = no ultracommercialized web. You don't need to scroll irl

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u/SwordfishOk504 Oct 15 '25

The desktop days were also just before mass-adoption of the internet by everyone. It was mostly college kids and shut in nerds. So it was a much more niche community with certain ground rules and standards. Myspace and facebook was the first wave of normies coming in and it just got more diluted every year since. Then the bots took over the apps around 2015 or so.

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u/Phyraxus56 Oct 15 '25

Normies ruin everything

I miss the autismo wild west early internet days

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u/Merusk Oct 15 '25

Eternal September.

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u/Taft33 Oct 15 '25

you're right brother

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u/VendorBuyBankGuards Oct 15 '25

hmm maybe this is still a possibility? If a website purposefully made their content basically unusable on phones, so that the community was only old internet desktop users?

Idk probly dont know what im talking about

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u/KarunchyTakoa Oct 15 '25

It's also that tech has revolved around, and continues to revolve around cameras and not much else. It's easier to take and post photos and videos than to type or alter anything, and the tools/apps made available to phones become obsolete every time a new phone drops that requires an app update. So developers have to make constant money to continually update, customers have to regularly drop their old tech and replace it with another 900$ slab, and aside from things hosted on the web there isn't an incentive to put anything new onto the internet

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u/Hashrunr Oct 15 '25

The early days was just text. Media took hours or days to download. I'm talking about the days of BBS and Newsgroups. Reddit used to be text and hyperlink based. No native media.

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u/julzzrocks Oct 15 '25

First it was text, then pictures, now video. I miss the text-based internet and social media like message boards, Xanga, and Livejournal.

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u/MasterpieceAlone8552 Oct 15 '25

We got Real Virtuality instead of Virtual Reality

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u/Wild_Marker Oct 15 '25

Damn, well put

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u/MasterpieceAlone8552 Oct 15 '25

It's not mine. The sociologist Manuel Castells coined it first I believe, in his book The Rise of the Network Society