Reddit.com co-Founder Alexis Ohanian fires back at CNN and Anderson Cooper
Why Hacker News recommends it
Not recommended; HN uses it as a critical example of Ohanian deflecting blame for Reddit's content problems.
What it is
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian responds in a short interview to Anderson Cooper's on-air criticism of Reddit over child exploitation content.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2012 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Critical SnydenBitchy · 2012-01 · on “How Reddit went from a second-tier aggregator to the Web’s unstoppable force”
Apropos reddit, here’s how Alexis Ohanian deflects the blame from redditors onto the victims of their creepy facebook-stalking and harassment: “Your kids need to know that any time they take an image and put it in a digital format… they should assume that it is now public content… That’s the useful thing I think CNN could have reported on, instead of making up a bunch of jibber-jabber about reddit.” [this video]
Critical SnydenBitchy · 2012-09 · on “Alexis Ohanian, Reddit co-founder and Web advocate”
Here’s how he deflects blame from redditors onto the victims of their creepy Facebook stalking, Photobucket fuskering, and real-life harassment: “Your kids need to know that any time they take an image and put it in a digital format… they should assume that it is now public content… That’s the useful thing I think CNN could have reported on, instead of making up a bunch of jibber-jabber about reddit.” —Alexis Ohanian [this video]
Critical jrflowers · 2024-04 · on “Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian invests in a Portland bar dubbed The Sports Bra”
It is good to know that the guy that defended r/jailbait is still a staunch supporter of women’s causes [this video]
Critical troosevelt · 2026-02 · on “Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok”
I found this YT vid from back when CNN was covering these subreddits. Ohanian gives this interview where he says (paraphrasing) that there's nothing they can do to police this stuff (they ended up just banning those communities) and it was human nature. We're again talking about some especially abusive content, subreddits targeting minors. I wonder what he'd say about this today, because it comes off as extreme naivety, and I even held similar views, though I don't get how your mindset could be so extreme that your first instinct would not be to disallow content which is this distasteful. It really shows how deeply "free speech" was embedded into net culture of the time above all else. Not t