Alexis Ohanian
speaker
292 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 12 Jun
Alexis Ohanian’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
and where people spend, just frankly, more of their time online, these spaces matter even more. And it's something, for the first probably 10 years of Reddit, most people didn't think it was possible for people to care that much about their online identity as they did their offline. That was one of those things that I really held fast to, and I think today we sort of take for granted.
Of course, people care, in many cases, much more about their online persona than their offline one. And I just hope to see it get used for more and more good at a time when, like I said, there's more division than ever. And the power of community is still something that I think runs deep in our species. And the internet is just a new medium to connect and hopefully for good.
Early on, people were often very confused why someone would spend so much of their free time moderating a community for free, essentially community management. And I'd often frame it, I grew up here in the United States, I was a Boy Scout, there were parents who were often involved volunteering for the Boy Scouts.
They'd be there for camping trips, they'd be there for meetings, they'd be helping out volunteering their time and energy. for community. And so I really took for granted the fact that if people wanted to do this offline for whatever organizations, faith groups, et cetera, that online these connections matter just as much, even though they may not feel as real.
And in fact, you can scale your time so much more efficiently, right? You can build a community of literally millions of people from your home. And that gives you a sense of purpose and a feeling of, you know, being able to create the sense of belonging for people. And that's, that's really meaningful. I mean, that is something that I've just seen continue to impress people.
I did not realize the full scale to which that would actually be working. And then probably the other side of it is just how important creating that sense of why for people is. I remember reading the book Bowling Alone, which talked a lot about a generation of adults who used to be a part of bowling leagues and these other things, but you saw this decline.
And people, in this case, it was men, but in general, people needing to find more and more of that connective tissue in their community and not having that sense of belonging. And I feel like in a lot of ways, the internet has created great versions of it. But at the same time, it's also created these
know the sort of dystopian versions of it where you can spend all of that time absorbed in a world that is online and miss out i think we have a generation of young people who i'm generalizing here but a lot of whom don't have the same muscle that they've they have not exercised the same muscles that we had growing up when it comes to relating and connecting to their fellow humans sitting across from them and you know as the father of two kids it's something i think about a lot
I've already had these conversations with Olympia and she just turned seven. And I try generally, I think my wife and I both, we try not to talk about
down to our kids like i really will explain a concept not like i would explain it to another 41 year old but at least like i i want her to to ask that follow-up question of like well what is that or why or how or so i you know and we've had versions of this conversation
she does not understand the internet i mean do i does anyone but there have been little glimpses that i have given her into it um but very very very tightly controlled really the only time she's ever online
right now at seven is playing roblox which she will do either with me and her mom or some friends from school she knows the internet basically as this this basically roblox yeah and a place where she has fun and runs around and that's it but that's the extent of interacting with folks i would like to put off social media now yes
kids have social media accounts it's run by us you know now that she's at an age of consent uh it's basically just like you know we're quite rarely putting photos up and it's only because she's like oh yeah you can you know post this up but the understanding of it is social media is something that i i for as long as possible would like to put off uh simply because this just isn't
I think we have gotten so good at creating those feedback loops that bring people back and plenty of people have written about this and talked about this. And this was one area where not intentionally, but Reddit was designed differently because it wasn't about real name and it wasn't about real photos and it wasn't about, hey, follow me, let me collect likes.
It was about, hey, we all like this community, let's share things about it that we care about. But generally speaking, it's still a black box and I'd like to keep it as much as possible. We even had that initial conversation of why it's so important, you know, to only be playing Roblox with Papa and Mama.
If we're playing with anyone, if we're talking to anyone, it's only the people, like the three people who we know. And it's this balance where I don't...
My take is I want to expose her to just enough that she can start to build that resilience or at least start to understand like, well, this is why you don't talk to random people on the Internet while still trying to preserve some amount of innocence, which is just such an awesome part of childhood. But at the same time, making sure she's steeled for the reality of what the world is like. But.
Probably my favorite application of the internet is every night I'll ask her a big question, and some nights she really doesn't want to, she doesn't have one. And so she'll just look at something on the table and be like, okay, where does salt come from, Papa? And I'll be like, okay, I see what you did. You just looked at the salt on the table, but that's fine. We'll find out.
And we'll ask AI, usually chat GPT, and fire it up and engage in this dialogue, which probably would have been a Google query a few years ago, but now is way more interesting and engaging. And I want her to know like, hey, you will have access to these tools that your papa could have only dreamed of as a kid, that your grandpa, your great grandpa could have never even imagined.
They would have thought they were wizards. And I want you to know this is a tool. This is a resource for you to use to help you exercise. It's a bicycle of the mind, right? And it's a tool, it's not an end all be all, but it's a tool for you to use that can provide tremendous value for you. When papa doesn't know like what temperature he needs to take the ribs off the smoker,
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