The Open Web Is Dying. Reddit Is Already Planning the Funeral.

Inside the collective grief, sarcasm, and strategy playing out on Reddit as AI scrapes the soul out of the internet.

First, a Reddit confession:

“I miss when people made stupid stuff online just because they wanted to.”

It doesn’t sound like a grand economic insight.
But it might be the most honest assessment of what the internet just lost.

When The Economist published its now-viral piece “AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?” Reddit’s r/neoliberal didn’t just agree. They started grieving. Loudly. Sarcastically. And very specifically.

The bargain is broken

The old internet was simple:
You made content → people visited your site → you earned money → you made more.

Today, AI tools skim your content, summarize it in a chatbot, and serve it with a polite citation (if you’re lucky). Users don’t click. Websites don’t earn. Creators disappear.

Reddit user Prashanth Chandrasekar (also the Stack Overflow CEO) put it bluntly:

“AI is choking off traffic to most content sites.”

Another chimed in:

“Even Wikipedia’s worried. That should terrify everyone.”

The open web has become a bot buffet.
And the chefs? They’re burning out unpaid, invisible, and increasingly obsolete.

Reddit’s grief is sarcastic and strategic

The r/neoliberal thread reads like a funeral for internet culture:

• “We’ve replaced curiosity with convenience.”
• “Everything is just oatmeal now.”
• “Google’s not a search engine anymore. It’s a summary engine.”

But behind the memes are real solutions:

• Bot paywalls: If AI wants to crawl, it should pay.
• Loyalty to creators: Subscribe. Share. Actually click.
• AI-resistant formats: Podcasts, live events, Discords.
• Weirdness as protest: Make content that’s too strange to summarize.

Reddit isn’t just venting. It’s diagnosing.

So what’s actually dying?

Not just traffic.
The joy of making something for no reason.
A blog post with a single GIF. A site that ranks dog breeds by vibe.
Fanfiction about Gandalf starting a startup.

These weren’t built for SEO.
They were built for fun. For a friend. For the hell of it.

Today, that feels unsustainable or worse, pointless.

The kicker

AI isn’t evil.
But it’s indifferent.
And indifference, scaled to billions of queries, becomes erasure.

If we want to save the internet, we can’t just block the bots. We have to start building like it matters again.

And maybe, just maybe, let a few websites stay stupid.

Sources:

• Reddit: r/neoliberal thread
• Original article: The Economist

About the Author

Rudra Kasturi is a growth strategist, AI educator, and founder of RudraKasturi.com – your go-to destination for sharp, honest insights on AI, SEO, media, and content strategy in the GenAI era.

Founder of AIVidhyarthi, an initiative to train the next generation of journalists, creators, and publishers in building sustainable growth with AI.

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