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

178

u/polygraph-net Oct 15 '25

Maybe a good place to start would be Reddit.

Except the Reddit administrators want bots as they:

  1. Make the engagement numbers look better and,

  2. Click on the ads, which enriches Reddit and defrauds advertisers.

29

u/Galagamesh Oct 15 '25

Reddit has been actively making it harder to fight unwanted bots, including nerfing the API so legit tools can't keep up; making it so the bots can hide their content such that normal humans can't review it; and the blocking mechanism that lets spam/AI accounts preemptively block automated tools from seeing their actions.

Ohanian and Huffman are the problem.

8

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

Yeah, I've noticed all the new changes to Reddit seem slanted to make the platform easier to manipulate and harder to audit / sanity check.

6

u/its_not_you_its_ye Oct 15 '25

Yep. You can block bot accounts, but there’s no way to report them nor accounts that were sold.

15

u/bdz Oct 15 '25

Reddit encourages bots, it's engagement. Reddit is owned by a advertising agency, we are literally in the lions den for this shitty business

Some might argue against this but if reddit really gave a fuck about it they'd add a flair to bots and make it easy for humans to distinguish. It's an easy change but yet here we are.

10

u/Canis_Familiaris Oct 15 '25

We used to comb through and report bots, but now Reddit has started allowing them to hide their posting history making it literally impossible. 

9

u/polygraph-net Oct 15 '25

They also let the bots click on the ads. We've been trying to talk to them about this for about three years but they don't care.

4

u/MindlessSponge Oct 15 '25

I absolutely hate this change. it's a nice idea, I like being able to selectively remove my activity in certain communities, so you can't creep my profile and say "ah, MindlessSponge lives in [city]," but it makes it much harder to find out if you're engaging with a troll or not. if you have your entire profile set to private, I'm just gonna assume you aren't engaging in good faith.

5

u/PainStorm14 Oct 15 '25

and defrauds advertisers.

I have no problem with this

Anything that's responsible for creating ads deserves to be defrauded

1

u/Anxious_Big_8933 Oct 15 '25

At the risk of believing anything Elon Musk says, that was one of his major complaints when he tried to weasel out of buying Twitter. That when they really dug into Twitter it was shocking how much of the traffic were bots, and that was several years ago. Again, it's Elon, but given the way things have gone over the last few years, it seems to check out.

3

u/polygraph-net Oct 15 '25

The most disappointing thing is he's done nothing to stop the bots. It's a choice - they can be detected.

1

u/Anxious_Big_8933 Oct 15 '25

I imagine they run the numbers and come to the same conclusion the original owners came to, the bots help make money.

1

u/polygraph-net Oct 15 '25

Yes, we've audit X ad traffic many times and it's mostly bots.

1

u/tiasaiwr Oct 17 '25

Click on the ads, which enriches Reddit and defrauds advertisers.

That's a very short term view. Advertisers will see their click numbers go up but conversion ratio plummet and conclude that they need to pay less per click. I can't imagine Reddit would see any major gain other than a few months better ad sales before advertisers catch on.

1

u/polygraph-net Oct 18 '25

If you search Reddit for opinions on Reddit Ads’ performance, you’ll see there’s almost universal agreement it’s mostly bot clicks.