How to make the internet fun again with Steve Huffman and Michael Sun

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2:00my first chat room was aol instant messenger you've got mail i was 10 years old i don't remember my screen name it was probably something kitschy tied to whatever boy band i loved that month but i remember the sound that little door creaking opened when a friend signed on i used aim to gossip to lurk on message boards to get homework help from total strangers in private chat rooms. I never met any of them face to face, but I always knew there was a real person on the other end typing back. That was the magic. Somebody actually answered. Chat looks very different now. This is TED Tech, a podcast from TED.

2:45I'm your host, Sherelle Dorsey. Years later, instead of aim, we have AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, you name it. When any question comes up, you can now type a question into your AI platform of choice. You dispute a charge with the bank, rebook a flight, troubleshoot the software that runs your life. And the thing that answers sounds human. It has a name, a warm tone. It responds with confidence, agrees with you, and pulls a tidy, sensible answer out of a sprawling pool of data. It feels like someone's there. Nobody is. What gets stripped away is exactly what Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman puts at the center of his TED Talk, the experience of talking to actual people.

3:37Answers that disagree with each other, that are messy, that weren't built to make you feel good. Answers built on lived and perfect experience. I interviewed Steve back in 2021 at Afrotech Executive, and I asked him for his favorite Reddit thread. I'll be honest, I don't remember his answer. But I remember mine. I'd been hooked on the AITA threads, am I the asshole? The ones that kept going viral on Twitter. Strangers weighing in on moral messes that aren't black or white and refusing to just tell you what you want to hear. Sometimes it turns out you are the asshole. That's the internet Steve is defending.

4:20When he took the stage at this year's TED conference, he opened with a question that sounded like a joke and isn't. Are humans going extinct on the internet? He draws a line between two models. There's a stage where everyone performs for an audience and the point is to be seen. And there's a city where people live in neighborhoods with their own cultures, inside jokes, and regulars. One, he argues, produces celebrities. The other produces citizens. Which one do we want to be a part of? But before we dive in, a quick break to hear from our sponsors.

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5:56And now, Steve Huffman takes the TED stage. So I'm Steve Huffman, and today I want to start with a question. Are humans going extinct on the Internet? I'll cut to the chase. My answer is no. But the Internet is becoming more automated and more optimized for attention. And people feel more alone. And the purpose of the Internet was to connect people. And the Internet has indeed connected billions of people. But being connected and the feeling of connection are two different things. And so if we want to maintain our humanity on the Internet, we are going to have to build it intentionally. And I want to introduce an idea, which is the stage versus the city.

6:47But first, a little bit of context. So a few of us started Reddit in 2005, 20 years ago. We were kids. I was 21. We didn't have a plan for the future of the Internet. We didn't have a plan for ourselves. The idea was very simple. We wanted a place where people could share links from around the web and talk about them and submit links and talk about them. They did. In fact, one of the first inside jokes on Reddit was, I didn't read the article, but... And then, you know, a thousand words about the article they didn't read. But from these conversations emerged communities. First one, then a couple, then a dozen, then thousands and hundreds of thousands.

7:28The communities sometimes are interesting, helpful, funny, weird. Sometimes all of these things. I left in 2009. I was gone for five years. And when I came back, the platform was in a different place. It was at a low point. Among many reasons, the most important was there was no policies. There's no guardrails about what behavior was acceptable or not. And so while communities are created naturally, they emerge naturally when people are together, a platform, a system where many communities can coexist in a healthy and sustainable way and thrive, that has to happen on purpose. And that's what we've been working on.

8:12A few years ago, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic. 73 % of people surveyed said technology contributes to that loneliness, which is not great if you run an internet technology company. But at the same time, people are spending more and more time at in-person events. So in the most chronically online era, people are seeking out in-person connection. So the question isn't, do people want connection? The question is, how do we deliver it? and how do we deliver it on the Internet intentionally? So what would a more human Internet look like? Well, let's set a little context here.

8:55If you were born after the year 2000, you have never experienced the Internet without social media. Social media and the Internet are different things. Social media is a distinct format that is unnatural, and it causes people to have to perform. Social media, the analogy I use is the stage. There's a spotlight. There's an audience. There's a performer. There's someone or something trying to get your attention. And so this environment creates performers. Imagine going to a wedding with an open bar and an open mic and everybody taking turns vying for attention. It's kind of annoying. As is social media.

9:43The currency of social media is engagement. It doesn't matter if it's positive or negative, just that somebody got your attention. And so what this causes is it causes people to say things they don't even believe to get that attention. And they very rarely say things they actually believe. So it's fitting that the Oxford word of the year last year was rage bait. And now with AI, you can take the human out of the loop entirely and create this content without people at all. So we sacrificed our humanity by saying things we don't believe and then sacrificed it again by adding AI into the mix. Merriam-Webster's word of the year in 2025 was slop.

10:24And so we sacrificed our humanity multiple times. Let me provide to you another perspective, another metaphor, which is the city. Cities are an inseparable concept from humanity. What is a city? A city is a place where people live, they work, they play, they go shopping, they eat. And cities naturally subdivide into neighborhoods. And those neighborhoods have distinct cultures and vibes. This is the model we use for Reddit. On Reddit, you can support, you can share a few laughs, you can learn about things. There's coffee shops, there's sports bars, there's a few weird basements. But the communities on Reddit are like the neighborhoods.

11:10They're naturally forming, and they have their distinct cultures and values and vibes. And we think this model is a better model for the Internet. The only city I know where everybody wants to be famous is L.A. In general, the stage creates celebrities, the city creates citizens. The stage concentrates attention. In the city, it's distributed. On the stage, people are competing for the spotlight. In the city, people are just with one another, talking, hanging out, sharing a few laughs. On the stage, people are working. Literally on social media, people are working to become rich and famous. You can't become rich and famous on Reddit.

11:59I'm sorry. The stage uses likes and algorithms to decide what to put in front of you. On Reddit, we use the upvote and the downvote. The upvote, you understand the downvote is very important. This is where communities enforce their values, define their culture, enforce the unwritten rules. Communities have values. Stages do not. I want to walk you through some of these neighborhoods or communities on Reddit. One of them we call Mom for a minute. These are all real examples, by the way. Mom for a Minute is a place where you can go if you need a mom for a minute, or you want to be a mom for a minute, if you need a little support or a hug or maybe some honest feedback.

12:44This example, somebody took a break, went back to school after five years and got into their dream med school and posted that. Hey, mom, I got into my dream med school today. And the reply, there was many of them, was, that is so awesome, you did it. Congratulations, and don't forget to take a little time for yourself. I'd invite you all to be, you know, a mom for a minute, if it suits you. Another community is called Bald.

13:11Community is present with us today. Bald is for people who are thinking about shaving their head and finally committing to being bald. It's a support community. It's a community about self-esteem and identity. This guy posted here, my mom is balding because of chemo. So I thought I'd join her. You can imagine the responses here, how supportive people were. Those responses made it back to the mom who was overjoyed and said this is probably the most supportive community on Reddit. I would also invite you all to be bald for a minute. Finally, another example. Am I the asshole? Don't answer that. Am I the asshole is one of the largest communities on Reddit.

13:53100 million people visited this last year alone. It's where people pose moral questions. And they're not all high stakes. For example, would I be an asshole if I uninvited my mother-in-law to my baby shower? The context here in the small print is, she's kind of mean to me, she makes these snarky jokes. Some people asked for more information. A few people said you're not the asshole, but the overwhelming consensus was, you are the asshole. The specific feedback was, this is a nuclear-level response to a small issue. or you have a husband problem, not a mother-in-law problem. Okay, so we post the same prompt to an AI chatbot, and it said, you are not the asshole.

14:38You are brave. That's not petty, M-dash. That's protective.

14:47So, okay, no judgment here, but what do we get in a world where you strip out humanity and the moral advice is constantly gassing people up and affirming them. On Reddit, you get tough love, but that is what a community is and that's where the values come from. And we believe this is essential. We've been doing this 20 years. We've seen a few things. Some of our observations. The first is we get to see how people behave when nobody's watching. Reddit is public, but it feels private. And what we see is that people are neighborly, the way they are in a city. We see that people aren't just good, they're actually overwhelmingly good.

15:34When you strip away all the incentives of social media, we see that people just want to be helpful and interesting and funny, which is a very different perspective than I think one might get if their view of humanity is through the lens of social media. We see that self-governance works amazingly well. What we say at Reddit is the only thing that scales with people is people. So all of our communities, they write their own rules on Reddit. Far and away, the most common rule within Reddit communities is some form of be civil. AI doesn't have values. Well, actually, it does. But those values are programmed in.

16:13And I think it's worth considering who did the programming.

16:20And finally, one of the biggest misconceptions, Reddit is mostly anonymous. People think mostly anonymous, that must lead to bad behavior. No. The context and the incentives lead to good or bad behavior. People being anonymous actually is safety. It gives people the freedom to be themselves and say what they really think. What we've learned about cities is that cities are organic organisms. They're living organisms created by their citizens. Everything interesting about the city that we're in was created by the people who live here, as is everything that was interesting on Reddit was created by its users.

16:56We didn't design it. It emerged. That's what you get when you let people be people. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not actually anti-AI. It is very powerful and very practical. Sometimes you just need an answer. You can go to an AI search and ask, what's the best way to cook rice and get an answer. You can go to Reddit and get 100 answers, but sometimes you just need one, and that's fine. But the more automated and summarized and sanitized and manicured that the rest of the Internet becomes, the more we need places for people to be people, for people to be humans. We need places, you know, fewer stages and more cities, places where you can, instead of performing, you can participate.

17:48Where the incentive isn't to go viral, the incentive is to be helpful. So if we want to keep our humanity in the age of AI, we need to build places for people to be humans and let them do it. Thank you.

18:04That was Steve Huffman at TED 2026.

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19:55Steve is speaking as the mayor of one of the biggest online cities. More than 100 million people pass through Reddit every day. So from where he stands, the fix is architectural. build better neighborhoods, and people will act like neighbors. But it's worth remembering that this city has a landlord. Reddit went public in 2024. It licenses what its users write to AI companies. The same human conversation Steve celebrates is also, increasingly, a product. So I wanted to pair his talk today with insight from someone who doesn't own any piece of the internet, someone who just grew up inside it. Michael's son is a writer and designer who spent his childhood on the internet of the 2000s.

20:38Slower, jankier, and in his telling, a lot more fun. He isn't nostalgic for the technology. He's nostalgic for the accident. Stumbling into a stranger, a forum, a song you never would have found if an algorithm had been doing the choosing. Steve comes at the problem from the top down, how platforms are designed. Michael comes at it from the bottom up. what the rest of us can do on the platforms we already have. Michael gave his talk to a room full of young people in 2023, just as AI chatbots were going mainstream. Listening to it now, a few years and a lot of chatbots later, I find that his question gets sharper.

21:18Is a human internet something the companies owe us? Or something we have to make for ourselves? Let me tell you a story. This story begins in the summer of 2008. It's one of those scorching summers where everything stops and time itself seems suspended. I'm 11 and sitting in front of the computer for days on end, melting into my chair. Somehow my dad has found this website that he claims is this cool new virtual reality experience, and I'm 11, which means I still trust my dad. So I hop on this side, right? It's called Exit Reality, which is exactly what I want to do because it's 42 degrees outside and there's no air con in our apartment.

22:06If you know what Second Life is, it's kind of like that. You can make your own avatars in the most rudimentary 3D graphics I have ever seen in my life, and then supposedly you can meet with and talk to other avatars in this endless expanse of digital landscape engulfed in a permanent sunset. but because it is 2008, everything freaks out when you press any button, and the lag is enough to give anyone anxiety. I mean, I already had anxiety as an 11-year-old, so it made me want to literally die, but I persevere, even though there's nary a soul in sight. I key smash my way through pixelated deserts and abandoned streets, and then in the corner of my screen, something appears.

22:55Someone appears. Their avatar is wearing a leather jacket and a mohawk. So I approach them and I'm like, hey, nice mohawk. Once again, I'm 11, so please withhold your judgment. I'm begging you. We start chatting and he tells me his name is Tommy. And then he asks ASL, which of course means age, sex, location. and obviously I'm like 17, male, Canada, even though I'm an 11-year-old boy living in northwest Sydney. We add each other on MSN and we start talking for hours a day. I'm talking hours since both of us are horny teens, or twins in my case, with absolutely nothing better to do. He tells me his favourite band is Death Cab the Cutie and I'm like, oh my god, same, even though the only thing on my iPod is Coldplay.

23:50and then suddenly we fall out of contact. I'm not sure how it happened, but it was devastating, pulverizing. One day we were talking for hours and the next we just weren't. My first real heartbreak, though certainly not my last online boyfriend. Now, you might be wondering why I'm telling you this story and it's not just because I love embarrassing myself on stage. Tommy, if you're listening, please DM me. I'm desperate. it. No, I'm just kidding. I'm telling you this story because I know you have a similar one, especially if you also grew up in the days of the early internet, right? Maybe you also got your heart broken by some guy you'd never met, or maybe you were less dramatic than I was and just made a friend on Club Penguin, or God forbid, Habbo Hotel.

24:38What I'm saying is this. We should return to the days of the early internet, the wild west of the internet where everything felt a little looser, a little jankier, a little more spontaneous, where you too could meet the love of your life and get ghosted as an 11-year-old, where discovery still felt possible. Here's the thing, the internet as it is right now is more restricted than ever, right? More corporate, more buttoned up, more difficult to find things outside of what we actually want to see and what's fed to us algorithmically. I'm an internet culture writer, and my screen time is 12 hours a day, which means I'm clinically insane.

25:21But even if you use the internet like a normal amount, I'm sure you'll have noticed that the internet today is a very different place to what it was 5, 10, 15 years ago. The internet as it is right now is both faster and harder than it ever has been. If you're on TikTok, which I think most of you are, you'll know that microtrends pop up at the speed of light, then disappear into the ether, never to be spoken of again. As an experiment, I wrote down a list of things that were going viral on TikTok about a month ago while I was writing this talk, right? Here's that list now. The Hunger Games, okay.

25:59Vodka pasta sauce, flavoured water, water talk, and unicorn syrup, being a la-la-la girl versus being an okay-okay-okay girl, I mean, none of these words are in the Bible, right? If you cast your mind back even further, the trends become even more meaningless. I'm talking coastal grandma aesthetic. I'm talking frazzled English woman. I'm talking the return of twee, pasta chips, whimsy goth, dark academia, barbie core. What do these words even mean? We are cycling through content at such a velocity that things become old news the second they hit the feed. Even me standing here right now telling you that things are happening faster, you guessed it, that's old news too.

26:45To quote one famous meme, everything happens so much. All of this means that it's harder to see the things that we actually want to see. We're losing control. This is not new, but what if there was a solution? What if we could turn back time? What if we could bring back some of the features that made the early internet so utopian, so lawless, so full of spontaneous connection and random experimental zeal? Well, we can. So the first solution is the Galaxy Brain solution, of course. It's to repurpose our existing platforms into spaces that feel like the early internet again. Like, for the past couple of years, I've been turning to niche Facebook groups as replacements for the early internet forums of the 2000s.

27:41I know I'm going to sound like the world's oldest Zoomer right now, but back in my day, we had these forums with message boards where you could message people about your specific interests, things like Fall Out Boy and other emo bands, countercultures and various subcultures, PlayStation games, etc., etc., etc. For the past decade or so, a smorgasbord of Facebook groups have popped up kind of in their place. They act very similarly to these forums. There are groups for public transport stands. There are groups for architecture heads who just really love stairs. There are groups for sharing disgusting photos of terrible food.

28:21I mean, there is a group for everyone, okay? There is a group called Subtle Asian Traits that many of you might have heard of. and it's literally just a group about being Asian. And it has two million members making it one of the biggest Facebook groups, right? Now is the peak time of absolute chaos. We are living in a time when everyone, even your aunt's friend who keeps sending you minion memes, has left Facebook, which means the only people left in these groups are truly the most desperate, the most committed, the most insane, the people who have thrown all caution to the wind and said, who cares to any given conventions of social media?

29:03These spaces are completely shielded from the frenetic, demanding nature of online life today. You can choose whether to post or not, whether to engage or not, whether to take things further or not. You most likely won't know anyone else in these groups. There are hardly any celebrities either in these groups. No one's in it to be seen. Being in these groups is truly like experiencing the last, almost, utopia online. Now, there is also an easier solution. But you need to bear with me, okay, because I know it sounds super dumb. The solution is to talk to your friends. And I promise I don't mean this in a kind of get off your phones, we live in a society kind of way, okay, promise.

29:54I mean talking to your friends and asking them what they're listening to, what they're consuming, what they've come across on their feeds. The worst thing about the algorithm is that it's so tailored to us that it can feel inescapable. But the best thing about the algorithm is that it's so tailored to us that no two feeds are the same. Your friend is listening to a song that you would have never encountered. Your parents are on a side of YouTube that you didn't even know existed. Your aunt's friend is still sending you minion memes, okay? I want every person in this room to try one thing after this.

30:32Open up your phones, you have permission, open any app, and show the person next to you the first thing on your feed. You might be surprised at how strangely vulnerable the experience is and also how surprising the results are. I mean, this is how I found out that my partner's TikTok feed was 90 % musical theatre content, which made me question all my life choices. But ignoring that, looking at your phone and looking at someone else's feed can help us bring back the randomness of the early internet. Think back to me and Tommy, for example. What we shared was a random fleeting encounter which couldn't have happened anywhere else but online or at any other time but the early internet.

31:18That phase might be long gone, but we can still bring back the emotional high of spontaneity, of discovery. So go forth and be crazy again. Go and have your heart broken by some guy who lives three continents away from you. Go and discover a corner of the internet previously hidden from you. Go and be a tween online again and go and turn the clock back to 2008. That was Michael Sun at TEDx Youth at Sydney in 2023. Now here's what strikes me, hearing these two side by side. Neither Steve nor Michael is telling us to log off. They're both betting the internet can still feel like a place where people live, not just a place where we're sold to, sorted, or answered by a machine.

32:05Where they differ is who carries the responsibility. Steve puts it on the builders. Design the city right and the citizens will follow. Michael puts it on us. Wander into the weird corner. Send the link to a friend. Leave room for the accident. The honest answer is probably both. Platforms set the rules of the road, but a neighborhood is only as alive as the people who show up to it. So I'll leave you with a few questions to sit with this week. When was the last time something online genuinely surprised you? Not because an algorithm predicted it, but because a person did. If human conversation is now one of the most valuable things on the internet, and it's being licensed to train AI, who should benefit from what we post?

32:51And what's one corner of the internet you'd actually miss if it disappeared tomorrow? And go see what the people there think too. Because for me, the internet worth protecting is still the one I found at 10 years old. The one where somebody types back.

33:11TED Tech is a podcast from TED. This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar, and the show is fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Consanza, Gallardo, Daniela, Gelleresso, Maria Ladias, Tanzika Sangmanivan, and Roxanne Hailash. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe and leave us a review so other people can find us too. I'm Sherelle Dorsey. Let's keep digging into the future. Join me next week for more.

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