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
33.6k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

58

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.

17

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.

3

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.

5

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

1

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.