• Alexis Ohanian predicts AI will drive demand for more raw human experiences.
• In 10 years, live theater will be more popular than ever, the Reddit cofounder contends.
• He says no matter what jobs are replaced by AI, humans will always have an advantage in empathy.

Alexis Ohanian predicted that in a future oversaturated with artificial intelligence, people will seek out more raw, emotive human experiences.

And in 10 years, he said, live theater will be more popular than ever.

The 41-year-old, who co-founded social media platform Reddit in 2005, told the "On Purpose with Jay Shetty" podcast this week that AI will soon have an undeniable impact on nearly every aspect of society, including the entertainment sector.

Ohanian, who also founded venture capital firm Seven Seven Six in 2020, said that the industry will see a big shift when AI makes on-screen entertainment better, faster, cheaper, and more dynamic — which he said is happening.

Every screen we look at will become so programmed to show us "what we want, when we want it, how we want it," he said, that "a part of our humanity will miss, you know, thousands of years ago when we were sitting around a campfire and that great storyteller was doing the voices and the impressions.'"

"That's ingrained in our species," he said.

And that kind of raw, in-person magic will feel novel, he suggested.

"I actually bet 10 years from now live theater will be more popular than ever," Ohanian said. "Because, again, we'll look at all these screens with all these AI-polished images, and we'll actually want to sit in a room with other humans to be captivated for a couple hours in a dark room to feel the goosebumps of seeing live human performances."

The same is true for sports, he told Shetty. "We need humans doing that. We need to feel their pain and their success and their triumphs," he said. "Those are the areas that get me most hopeful."

AI can't replace genuine human empathy, Ohanian suggested.

No matter what jobs robots take over from us in the future, fields of work where empathy is a core component of the job will have an advantage, he said. And that's why one of the most important, marketable skills he's teaching his kids is empathy, he said.

• Serena Williams, one of the greatest athletes ever, is married to Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian.
• Separately, they've accrued vast amounts of money thanks to their successful careers.
• Their combined wealth allows them to make fascinating investments and lead a fabulous lifestyle.

Serena Williams is arguably the most dominant tennis player in the history of the sport, earning over $90 million in prize money throughout her career.

Alexis Ohanian founded the popular website Reddit and became a multimillionaire at age 23 when he sold it. 

The two met in May 2015, married shortly after, and have two children. Their estimated combined net worth is $330 million, which they spend on beautiful homes and a globe-trotting lifestyle. 

Take a look at how the sports-tech power couple make and spend their millions.

Serena Williams has a net worth of more than $260 million.

Her wealth, in large part, comes from earning more than $94 million in career prize money — considerably more than any other professional women's tennis player. 

Williams has also earned millions from endorsement deals.

She's partnered with Nike, Beats by Dre, Gatorade, Subway, Gucci, JPMorgan Chase, Tempur-Pedic, Ford, Aston Martin, Audemars Piguet, Intel, and Wilson.

In 2015, she debuted her own clothing line with HSN, the Serena Williams Signature Statement collection.

"I wanted to showcase a lot of fringe," she said, explaining the inspiration for her designs to Women's Wear Daily in 2015.

In May 2017, she began serving on the board of SurveyMonkey.

That year, she and the company conducted a survey looking at Americans' perceptions of the gender pay gap. On average, women continue to earn less than men, according to Pew Research.

Nike honored their longtime partnership with Williams by naming a building after her in 2022.

Nike's headquarters, located in Beaverton, Oregon, includes a 1-million-square-foot building with 140 tennis courts, which Nike named the Serena Williams Building. Williams became a Nike athlete in 2003.

Will Smith played her father in "King Richard," the 2021 film that Williams executive produced along with her sister, Venus.

The movie dramatized the sisters' childhood, when their father served as their coach and helped them rise to tennis stardom. Williams hoped sequels would follow, focusing on the ways Serena's and Venus' stories diverged, she told Business Insider in 2022.

In the summer of 2015, Williams began dating tech guru Alexis Ohanian.

The two married in 2017, less than two years after they met and a month after the birth of their first child. 

Williams told Vanity Fair she knew he was going to propose when he asked her to fly to Italy. "I was like, 'Serena, you're 35, you're ready. This is what you want,' " she remembered thinking.

Ohanian founded the popular social media platform Reddit in 2005.

A year later, he sold the site to Condé Nast for $10 million. He was 23 years old.

The Reddit deal instantly gave Ohanian more money than his parents had made their entire lives, he said.

Reddit is now worth billions. Ohanian later said the money was enticing because his mother was sick with terminal cancer at the time. 

"The deal was months in the making, and I wish I'd had more advisors around the table giving me more perspective on the sale," he wrote on Twitter, now X, in 2020.

After leaving Reddit in 2009, he had stints at various companies like the travel search site Hipmunk, the startup accelerator Y Combinator, and the social enterprise Breadpig.

Ohanian rejoined Reddit as an executive chairman in 2014 then resigned in 2020.

His resignation was in response to the site's long reputation as a platform for racist and misogynistic content, as well as for misinformation. He urged the company to fill his seat with a Black candidate instead.

Michael Seibel joined as the company's first Black board member days later.

After leaving Reddit, he focused on investing in new companies.

In 2020, Ohanian also left Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm he co-founded in 2011. 

A year later, he announced a new VC firm called "Seven Seven Six." 

The firm has invested in women's track and Colin Kaepernick's AI company. Previously, Ohanian pledged $1 million to Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp using his Reddit stock gains.

Ohanian has an estimated net worth of $70 million, giving the power couple a combined value of $330 million.

In 2019, Forbes estimated Ohanian's net worth was $70 million and put Williams' fortune at $260 million in 2022. 

The duo met in the spring of 2015 at the Cavalieri, a luxury hotel that boasts the only restaurant in Rome with three Michelin stars.

Ohanian sat down next to Williams outside by the pool, Vanity Fair reported in 2017. After trying to get him to move to a new table, she and her friends invited him to join them.

Ohanian had never watched Williams play — and wasn't much of a tennis fan — but he agreed to come to her match that night.

Ohanian and Williams went on their first date in Paris the following month.

The pair walked around the Jardin des Plantes, and Ohanian bought Williams some candy. 

Two chaperones accompanied them on their first date, Williams' agent and assistant, Ohanian recently said on TikTok. 

Ohanian then went to watch her play in the French Open later that week.

Ohanian proposed at the Cavalieri — where they first met — on December 10, 2016.

He got down on one knee at the same table where they had sat over a year before. 

Her engagement ring is reportedly worth more than $2 million.

To pay for the 17-carat diamond, Ohanian used part of the $50 million he got from crypto exchange Coinbase and other investments, he told Forbes in 2023.

In 2017, Williams dominated the Australian Open while eight weeks pregnant.

Ohanian cheered on Williams, who won her 23rd Grand Slam and earned $2.7 million.

Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. was born in September 2017 and goes by Olympia.

Following in her mother's footsteps, Olympia is a burgeoning fashion icon.

Olympia became the youngest person to grace the cover of Vogue at three months old.

Williams and Ohanian purchased a piece of LA's Angel City soccer team and put a portion in Olympia's name.

At the time, Olympia, who was two, was the youngest owner of a professional sports team.

Nearly a month after Olympia's birth in 2017, Ohanian and Williams tied the knot in an opulent wedding in Louisiana.

Williams wore an estimated $3.5 million worth of jewelry at the ceremony. For the reception, she changed into a pair of sparkly Nikes covered in Swarovski crystals.

Less than a year later, Williams and Ohanian attended one of the few ceremonies more extravagant than their own: the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle in England.

Williams and Markle have been friends since 2014. 

"She quickly became a confidante I would text when I was traveling, the friend I would rally around for her tennis matches, and the down to earth chick I was able to grab lunch with just a couple weeks ago in Toronto," Markle wrote on her blog, The Tig, in 2014.

Williams and Ohanian have a mutual love of football.

Williams and her sister, Venus, became partial owners of the Miami Dolphins in 2009.

And Ohanian's first purchase after selling Reddit was field-level season tickets to Washington's football franchise for himself and his father.

"My dad had two nosebleeds for a number of years, and I upgraded his seats to four seats at the front row around the 50-yard line," he told CNBC in 2018.

At one point, Ohanian, Williams, and Olympia lived in a $6.7 million home in Beverly Hills, California, but they've since listed that property for sale.

The family purchased the 6,000-square-foot home in 2017. It has a bar, pool, and spacious kitchen but no tennis court. 

They spend most of their time in Florida, where they own a stunning property in Palm Beach Gardens. The house includes an art gallery and trophy room.

They also have homes in Paris and Bel Air. One of her houses has an entire closet dedicated to her shoe collection.

Williams also enjoys luxury cars.

When she was Aston Martin's chief sporting officer, she was photographed with a $300,000 Vanquish. In 2018, she became a brand ambassador for Lincoln. 

Not all of the couple's purchases are so pricey.

Ohanian also buys comics and video games.

Though they lead a lavish lifestyle, Ohanian and Williams are also very philanthropic.

In 2011, the United Nations Children's Fund appointed Williams as a goodwill ambassador. UNICEF noted her work in Ghana in 2006, handing out anti-malarial nets and promoting vaccinations. 

When Colin Kaepernick's 2018 Nike ad sparked controversy, she tweeted that she was "especially proud" to work with the brand. She previously voiced her support for the NFL player's activism as well. 

Ohanian is also an outspoken advocate for digital privacy.

In his 2013 book, "Without Their Permission," he imagined a dismal, not-too-distant future — in 2025 — where the notion of privacy had completely disappeared. 

He's also donated money to organizations working to diversify tech companies' talent pools. 

At the 2023 Met Gala, Williams announced she was pregnant with their second child.

The tennis player posted pictures of herself and Ohanian on Instagram, writing: "Was so excited when Anna Wintour invited the 3 of us to the Met Gala."

Adira River Ohanian was born on August 15, 2023.

"Adira is a girl's name of Hebrew origin and means 'mighty,' 'strong,' and 'majestic.' The elegant name is popular in many cultures around the world," Williams wrote on Instagram on her daughter's first birthday. "Adira is the feminine form of the classic name Adir. It is a Biblical name, meaning 'Strong One.' "

The family travels the world together.

Olympia accompanied her parents to the 2024 Olympics in Paris this summer and on an island-hopping vacation last winter.

In November, Ohanian revealed he'd undergone surgery to remove part of his thyroid.

Doctors feared the nodules on his thyroid might be cancerous, so they removed half of the gland. 

"The worst part tbh has been not being able to lift for 2 weeks but big fella will be back at it next week and I took my girls to Disney World this week so life is wonderful," he wrote on Instagram.

He urged other men, especially fathers, to go to the doctor for regular checkups. Earlier this year, Ohanian was diagnosed with Lyme disease as well.

As the couple grew their family, Williams found it difficult to make time for her tennis career.

 In August 2022, she announced her intention to retire after the US Open. 

"If I were a guy, I wouldn't be writing this because I'd be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family," she wrote in an essay for Vogue.

At the end of her career, Williams was still the second-highest-paid woman in sports.

In 2021, she made $45.9 million. Most of that money came from endorsement deals and other ventures.

She said she has never been motivated by money and never thought about checks.

"I've actually never played for money — I just thought you would go out there and hold a trophy," Williams said on "Kneading Dough," a personal-finance video series, in 2018.

She tried to deposit her first million-dollar check through a bank drive-thru before the teller told her she needed to come inside for such a large transaction.

But there is plenty to come from Williams, who says she's passionate about investing in start-ups.

Along with Alison Stillman, Williams launched Serena Ventures in 2014. The firm's goal is to fund women and other founders who are underrepresented. 

"I've invested in over 85 companies, and I also have about 14 unicorns," Serena said in an April TikTok video. Unicorns are privately owned companies valued at over $1 billion. 

Some of her investments include MasterClass, Tonal, Impossible Foods, and Noom, Vogue reported in 2022.

Williams said she became interested in investing when she was shocked to learn that less than 2% of all venture capital money was invested in women.

Williams told Forbes she had goals beyond just being an endorsement athlete, "I want to be in the infrastructure. I want to be the brand, instead of just being the face."

 

She's also still getting endorsement deals. In 2023, Williams appeared in two Super Bowl ads.

One was a "Caddyshack" homage for Michelob ULTRA, and the other was a locker room pep talk for Rémy Martin.

She also recently started her own beauty line, Wyn Beauty, and signed a deal with Penguin Random House to write two books.

The first is a memoir about her life, and the second is an inspirational book highlighting what she's learned as a philanthropist and an advocate for women and in her career as an investor with Serena Ventures. 

This story was originally published on May 2, 2023, and updated on December 17, 2024.

 

• Alexis Ohanian shared three books that shaped his career in 2024.
• Ohanian cofounded Reddit with Steve Huffman and currently serves as founder of 776 VC firm.
• He said "Unreasonable Hospitality" is a must-read for anyone trying to build a brand.

Alexis Ohanian has been recognized as an innovator since cofounding Reddit in 2005 and selling it a year later to Condé Nast. That sale was reportedly between $10 to $20 million.

In the 20 years since then, Ohanian has vastly multiplied his wealth and business portfolio with investments in tech, sports, and other innovative ideas.

The tech founder and investor, who launched his venture firm Seven Seven Six in 2020 after officially leaving Reddit's leadership team, shared with Business Insider the top three books that shaped his career in 2024.

Ohanian said these are his must-reads for various reasons. His quotes have been edited for clarity.

"Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration" by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

My founding partner at 776, Katelin Holloway, helped produce "Creativity Inc." based on her time at Pixar. This book informed a lot of how we turned around Reddit and how I'm building 776.

"Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It" by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

Zachariah Reitano, the founder/CEO of Ro — one of my 776 investments — recommended the book "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on it." It's a must-read for anyone, not just CEOs and founders. I re-read it every year to refresh my memory.

"Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect" by Will Guidara

Maggi from the 776 team recommended "Unreasonable Hospitality," written by Will Guidara who achieved fame as former coowner and leader of Eleven Madison Park. EMP is one of my favorite restaurants. The methods and mindset here are imperative for anyone trying to build an exceptional brand, even outside of food and hospitality.

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Longtime readers of the newsletter might’ve noticed that we skipped a week last week. That wasn’t our intent, and we do apologize. The reason was we’ve reached an inflection point in the AI news cycle. We’re […]

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It used to be that when a killer emerged in America, we found out who the man was before we began to enshroud him in myth. But with Luigi Mangione, the lead suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, that process was reversed. The internet assumed it already knew everything about Thompson's killer before a suspect had even been identified, let alone arrested.

Within hours of the shooting, social media was churning out a mythologized version of the masked man. In his anonymity, he became an instant folk hero, portrayed as a crusader for universal healthcare, a martyr willing to risk it all to send a message to America's insurance giants with "the first shots fired in a class war." A Reddit forum offered up dozens of laudatory nicknames to crystalize his mythology: the Readjuster, the Denier, the People's Debt Collector, Modern-Day Robin Hood. "I actually feel safer with him at large," one tweet a day after the shooting said; it received 172,000 likes. A surveillance image of the suspect moved some to comment that he was "too hot to convict" and prompted comparisons to Jake Gyllenhaal and Timothée Chalamet. In New York City, a "CEO-shooter look-alike competition" was held in Washington Square Park. Surely, the internet assumed, the suspect shared left-wing ideas about the cruelties of privatized healthcare.

Then the man himself appeared — and he didn't fit into any of the neat categories that had already been created to describe him. On X, he followed the liberal columnist Ezra Klein and the conservative podcaster Joe Rogan. He respected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and retweeted a video of Peter Thiel maligning "woke"-ism. He took issue with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He played the cartoon video game "Among Us," posted shirtless thirst traps, quoted Charli XCX on Instagram, and had the Goodreads account of an angsty, heterodox-curious teenage boy: self-help, bro-y nonfiction, Ayn Rand, "The Lorax," and "Infinite Jest." Yes, he seemed to admire the Unabomber. But mostly, this guy — a former prep-school valedictorian with an Ivy League education and a spate of tech jobs — was exceedingly centrist and boring. A normie's normie. He wasn't an obvious lefty, but he wasn't steeped in the right-wing manosphere either. His posted beliefs don't fit neatly into any preestablished bucket. In his 261-word manifesto, which surfaced online, he downplayed his own qualifications to critique the system. "I do not pretend," he wrote, "to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument."

That didn't stop the denizens of social media from pretending to be the most qualified people to lay out exactly who Mangione is. He's "fundamentally anti-capitalist" and "just another leftist nut job." Or he's "a vaguely right-wing ivy league tech bro." Or he was invented by the CIA, or maybe Mossad, as a "psyop." The reality of Mangione — his messy, sometimes contradictory impulses — allowed everyone to cherry-pick the aspects of his personality that confirmed their original suspicions. In the attention economy, patience is a vice.

The rush to romanticize killers is nothing new. A quarter century ago, we cast the Columbine shooters as undone by unfettered access either to guns or to the satanic influences of Marilyn Manson and Rammstein. A decade ago, we debated the glamorization of the Boston Marathon bomber, gussied up like a rock star on the cover of Rolling Stone. But social media has sped up the assumption cycle to the point where we put the killer into a category before police have found the killer. Perhaps there's a "great rewiring" of our brains that has diminished our capacity to understand each other, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests in "The Anxious Generation" — a book Mangione had retweeted a glowing review of.

Mythmaking is easier, of course, when it's unencumbered by reality. The less we know about a killer, the more room there is to turn him into something he's not. From what we have learned so far, Mangione is a troubled Gen Zer who won the privilege lottery at birth and ascribed to a mishmash of interests and beliefs. We will surely learn more about him in the coming days, weeks, and months. But now that we know who he is, it will be hard, if not impossible, to let go of our initial assumptions. Instead, we'll selectively focus on the details that fit tidily into the myths we've already created. In the digital-age version of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," the legend was already printed by the time the facts came along.

Scott Nover is a freelance writer in Washington, DC. He is a contributing writer at Slate and was previously a staff writer at Quartz and Adweek covering media and technology.

On Monday, Reddit announced it would test an AI-powered search feature called "Reddit Answers" that uses an AI model to create summaries from existing Reddit posts to respond to user questions, reports Reuters.

The feature generates responses by searching through Reddit's vast collection of community discussions and comments. When users ask questions, Reddit Answers provides summaries of relevant conversations and includes links to related communities and posts.

The move potentially puts Reddit in competition with traditional search engines like Google and newer AI search tools like those from OpenAI and Perplexity. But while other companies pull information from across the Internet, Reddit Answers focuses only on content within Reddit's platform.

Read full article

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As more AI companies gobble up Reddit’s data to fuel their own chatbots, the popular online forum site has begun testing a new conversational AI feature of its own. The feature, called Reddit Answers, allows visitors to ask questions and receive curated summaries of relevant responses and threads across the platform, the company announced on […]

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• Influencers must adapt to keep up in an oversaturated market.
• Audiences are tired of ads and seek authentic, expertise-driven content.
• Platforms like VSCO and Reddit have gained traction, with users craving genuine communities.

A splintered social media world is on the horizon — and it's paving the way for a new, more authentic breed of influencer.

"People are just trying to find authentic communities," Eric Wittman, CEO of photo-editing app VSCO, told Business Insider.

Wittman pointed to Reddit's surge in users and skyrocketing earnings as an example. Bluesky's user base has also risen in recent weeks to 21 million, and Mastodon is seeing more modest growth, with about 90,000 new sign-ups this month, according to its CEO.

In a white paper published earlier last year, Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, who researches digital public infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said there's a reboot taking place.

He believes that will include the rise of "very small online platforms" that host the kind of intimate conversations that are lacking on today's major platforms.

"It will create a lot more fragmentation in the market," said Wittman. "It's going to be more interest-driven and more community-driven, which I think is healthy."

Trust is key, losing it is costly

Audiences appear to be more discerning. Some are getting cynical about sponsored posts and bored of being sold to, especially when products or brands don't align with their values.

For example, TikTok can feel like a pseudo-shopping channel where every other video seems to be an ad.

Kate Smoothy, an SEO specialist and the founder and director of Webhive Digital, is also a content creator with 47,000 TikTok followers. She told BI she only partners with brands that she believes in because she values her audience's trust.

"As soon as you lose that trust, you may as well kiss the whole content creator thing goodbye," she said.

Smoothy said she sees things changing, with different "tiers" of content creators emerging from the industry's oversaturation. The top ones will have prioritized their community and built trust with their audience.

"Ultimately, the 'lower down' creators will struggle to establish themselves or pivot as the industry adapts to new platforms and changes in trends," Smoothy said.

New social media horizons

Lucy Edgerley, the head of influence at the global social media agency Born Social, told BI that Gen Zers, in particular, are craving creativity, entertainment, and inspiration.

Some may choose alternative platforms like VSCO, Bluesky, and Mastodon over the major players of Instagram, TikTok, and X.

Others are following their favorite creators to subscription services like Substack or Patreon.

"Platforms like Pinterest, which foster ideas-driven content, are thriving because they align with this demand," she said.

Wittman said that 57% of VSCO's user base is between the ages of 18 and 24, and the app is seeing a million new sign-ups a month. He pointed to the lack of ads on the platform — none if users opt for the paid service, which starts at a monthly fee of $2.50.

"We are very restrictive on who can advertise on our platform," Wittman said. "When we do these brand partnerships, we want to make sure that it's a brand that kind of suits our principles and philosophies as well."

Young people who have grown up with social media are learning the lessons about the dark side of it — the mental health toll, the bullying, and the over-consumerism — the hard way, he said.

"They're looking for healthier places to go to where they're not feeling manipulated," he said.

Intellectual influencers will thrive

Not everyone sees it this way. While newer platforms such as Threads and Bluesky are reporting impressive numbers, Kim Murray, the founder of the influencer marketing agency Virality Boost, told BI that many influencers are likely to stay put with what they know.

"Most creators find it challenging to build and maintain audiences across an ever-expanding array of platforms," she said.

Audiences are already more selective than they used to be, she added, so influencers will have to evolve wherever they are, regardless of their follower count.

"This shift signals a transformation rather than an endpoint," Murray said. "The real opportunity lies in how influencers adapt to meet this heightened selectivity by focusing on distribution strategies that deliver genuine value to both audiences and brands."

Wittman said the bar has been raised, and he sees a move toward "intellectual influencers" emerging, where people gravitate to creators who offer something unique.

"They actually want experts," he said. "They want it to be fun, and they want it to be creative. They don't want just some crazy infomercial."

Edgerley agreed we're witnessing a shift. Despite the success of YouTube shorts and TikTok, long-form storytelling is on the rise, she said, suggesting users want deeper engagement rather than endless scrolling.

"Ultimately, it's about meeting audiences with humor, inspiration, and substance," she said. "Not just ads."

Reddit is concentrating on international markets such as the U.K., India, Brazil, and the Philippines to bolster its user base.

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• Reddit's "r/TVtooHigh" is focused on criticizing people who mount their televisions too high.
• The comments are absolutely brutal, roasting any TVs mounted above eye level.
• And don't even get them started on mounting a TV above a fireplace.

The ideal place to mount a television — at least according to most experts — is so it's at eye level while you're sitting on the couch. Samsung suggests mounting it 42 inches from the floor, which would be the target sightline for a 5-foot-6-inch adult who's sitting down.

Not everyone does this, of course. And the people who don't are the target of scorn and derision from one of the most intense corners of the internet: Reddit's r/TVTooHigh.

There are some places on the internet we know are dens of trolling and cruelty: 4chan. Certain Discords. Snark subreddits. Nextdoor comments. The replies on X to anything Elon Musk posts. But this one subreddit dedicated to discussing television mounting is one of the most furious pits of vipers I've encountered. And I absolutely love it.

The subreddit has more than 250,000 members and a mix of posts from people seeking real advice about whether their TV placement is right (it almost never is) — or posting photos of laughably high TVs they found either in real life or online.

A recent post shows a photo someone found of a real-estate listing where a television is mounted so high it touches the ceiling. "It's tv shaped crown moulding," suggests one Redditor. "The mental health epidemic is very tragic," says another.

In another post, a Redditor posted a photo of a television placed high above a fireplace (more on that in a second) with the caption, "We've been roasting my buddy for hours."

More than 500 comments came rolling in:

"At this height, it can be used to display the menu at McDonald's."

"Buddy in the NBA?"

"When is he installing the 2nd story viewing deck?"

"I know a chiropractor ..."

There is something that absolutely delights me about seeing this kind of roasting. Absolutely savage, vicious insults being hurled at people — but about something totally meaningless. No one is going to get their feelings hurt about a TV. In this moment of division and tension in the world, witnessing low-stakes, harmless trolling is a beautiful relief. It soothes my soul to see people hurl insults about TV mounting, in the same way someone might feel relaxed by soothing music or deep breathing.

And besides, they're right — a lot of people do mount their TVs too high.

But there's another topic that frequently comes up that sparks a seething hatred that verges on zealotry: mounting TVs above a fireplace. In many newer-built American homes, fireplaces are placed at the focal point of a living room and can be an obvious place for a TV.

When people come to the subreddit looking for advice about where to mount a TV when they have a fireplace as the focal point in a room, the commenters will go to ridiculous lengths to suggest workarounds: Moving all the furniture so the couch faces an alternate wall. Removing built-in bookshelves on surrounding walls. Some even suggest disabling or removing the fireplace altogether.

"I don't like it, but there are no hard rules," Keren Richter, an interior designer from the New York design firm White Arrow told Business Insider. '"If I had to do it over a fireplace for space constraints, I'd get a Reflectel TV or a projector with a screen. Generally, I try to make media discreet. The fireplace is the focal point and I don't want a big black rectangle to compete with it. Plus, the viewing angle is uncomfortable."

There are other non-aesthetic reasons to avoid a TV over a fireplace: drilling into the wall above a working fireplace could damage the chimney's interior. Excessive heat from fires could also fry the television. There's a product called Mantel Mount that has an extending arm so you can move the TV up and down, but r/TVTooHigh also has strong feelings about this.

When someone posted a photo of their TV mounted with the Mantel Mount, the comments went wild.

"Thank you for your sacrifice and demonstrating why TV above the fireplace is terrible."

"It's dreadful."

"It's an abomination"

"An aesthetic nightmare."

There are some positive things that come out of r/TVTooHigh. Some people genuinely find it helpful.

Jeffrey Episcopo, the creator of the group and its moderator told Business Insider that people participate to have a good time — and to help one another.

"Yeah, it's easy to make fun of someone for having a TV that's too high, but that would get old pretty quick," he said. "It's quite rewarding when someone posts their TV that is too high and asks for recommendations, you give a recommendation, and they post an update saying how great their new setup is and how grateful they are that you helped them."

Joe Wall joined the subreddit as a lurker about six months ago when he and his wife moved into a new apartment. Their TV was mounted high on the wall at an angle, pointed down.

"Every post I came across would make me stare at my TV and think about how hard I would get roasted. So I had to do something about it," he told Business Insider.

Wall changed it up: He removed the TV from the mount and placed the set on a new media stand. When he posted the before-and-after pictures to r/TVTooHigh, the comments were overwhelmingly positive.

"It transformed the space and looks so good!"

"Now we're cooking with gas."

"Love a redemption arc!"

Correction: November 30, 2024 — Jeffrey Episcopo is the creator and moderator of the Reddit group r/TVTooHigh. His name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.

This morning, at around 7 a.m. PT, the social media platform Reddit experienced yet another outage after experiencing one yesterday afternoon. Thousands of users are currently unable to access its website and app. As of this writing, 51,221 users reported problems on Downdetector.com, up from the 47,000 users who reported problems yesterday. According to its […]

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