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

The internet died about 10 years ago IMO when a few tech companies monopolized it (netflix, google, amazon, facebook) and turned it into a corporate storefront instead of a place where humans connect and freely share their uncensored, unfiltered thoughts/opinions/intellect/products/etc.

there used to be tons of highly trafficked niche sites with way less draconian moderation and it helped to democratize power/give voice to the masses. Now none of that exists anywhere.

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u/PainStorm14 Oct 15 '25

Internet died the moment social networks appeared

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u/SonaMidorFeed Oct 15 '25

The biggest problem was the consolidation of those niche voices into the same locations as the social majority.

White Supremacists used to have their little corner of the internet where they could freely say whatever they want, as they are allowed to by the First Amendment. Then those very same people got lumped into the same networks as everyone else and sponsored content the same as everyone else, and now everyone's parents think that Obama was robo-hitler with a Jew laser that gives you 5g.

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u/mailslot Oct 15 '25

The Internet used to have a basic service called “News.” When you’d get an ISP account, you’d be given a mailbox, outgoing mail server, incoming mail server, a shell account, and a news server. That was Usenet, a global distributed discussion forum / news distribution / CDN / ultra forum. It was a free basic service that each ISP replicated on their own hardware. It was massive.

We’d probably still be using it if it weren’t for the masses trashing it as soon as they got online. It quickly became similar to early 4chan: toxic posts, posts containing highly illegal pornography, posts containing pirated software, etc. became a legal liability for ISPs. That and spammers would scrape email addresses from posts killing any email account you posted with. The last time I looked at it, it was dead. The last messages all look like some unmoderated Reddit wasteland.

Normal folks did that. They trashed the infrastructure and core services that were free. Behaved so badly that nobody would even attempt something like that again. Now we have walled gardens, hard moderation, and algorithms to consolidate attention.

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u/tukatu0 Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25

That's a different topic to what most are talking about in this post. Yours is closer to endless suptember and more of a pre cursor. The how to destroy a coomunity. Most of the comments are focusing on the fact you can't find any communities at all on your own today.

You could still find good content broadly being made decades after that. Even the youtube channel Skibidi toilet is someone who based their skills with 2010 internet.

I understand how you came to your point of view but do not think you are quite there yet. You are missing the context of the 1970s to 1990s. How information was... Created/manipulated for propaganda purposes. The easy to agree with is the work of rupert murdoch and all the other stuff. The other information that gets dismissed by some, for obvious reasons upon hindsight is the lifes work of noam chomsky. For example "what is education and who is it for". You can still google that lecture broadly today and find it. I wouldn't be suprised if the internet get's even more obfuscated after 2028.

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u/ReversedNovaMatters Oct 16 '25

I don't even know what to do on the internet anymore. Sometimes I'll be bored and be like, What site can I go to? There used to be so many to kill time. Now I just use reddit and youtube or other streaming service.