HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Reddit.com co-Founder Alexis Ohanian fires back at CNN and Anderson Cooper Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Reddit.com co-Founder Alexis Ohanian fires back at CNN and Anderson Cooper

tjandthetux
Interviews
YouTube
Cited on HN 4 times, 2012–2026, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Not recommended; HN uses it as a critical example of Ohanian deflecting blame for Reddit's content problems.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian responds in a short interview to Anderson Cooper's on-air criticism of Reddit over child exploitation content.

4 critical · Interviews · news from the time

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@SnydenBitchy Jan 2012 Pushes back
on HN thread 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]
@SnydenBitchy Sep 2012 Pushes back
on HN thread 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]
@troosevelt Feb 2026 Pushes back
on HN thread Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok
Read more
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 to misuse this argument, but I really really wonder how he feels given 1) who he's married to 2) how he presents himself today and 3) that he has a daughter now. I'd guess this is NOT his view of running Digg, [this video]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close