Reddit Stock Collapses 23% as AI Eats Away at User Growth

ricardobeat 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They killed their own product by allowing toxic communities to flourish, the disastrous redesign, walling off their web content to push their mobile app and force signups, closing off their API, etc; and more recently allowing AI-generated content to grow unchecked.

▲

r0fl 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’m shocked Google does not delist Reddit for their shitty web experience

If you are on mobile and you are not signed in you get the entire free site walled unless you sign in or go use the app

Google is supposed to show the best content at the top

Apart from those fake spyware pop ups I cannot think of a worse surfing experience

	▲	brador 38 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Google is definitely showing more linkedin and Facebook/meta/insta posts as search results. The Reddit content Google serves is down. Around 50% less I’d say and the change started this month.
	▲	lostlogin 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Google is supposed to show the best content at the top Unless it’s showing adverts first.

▲

9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

AndrewKemendo 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I started/run a old and moderately popular sub (top 100 in sports) and haven’t noticed any issues that we haven’t dealt with before.

We shut down during the blackout so it’s not like it’s all been easy.

I got stock a couple years ago, that’s about it and I thought that was nice having been on Reddit since 2006 or whatever.

That said we’re not a trash sub and take moderation extremely seriously.

▲

anon48293 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I’d argue moderators taking themselves too seriously is precisely reddits problem, but okay.

	▲	LexiMax 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Good online communities have active and engaged moderation. That said, Reddit moderation seems stuck in a weird limbo where moderators have a lot of power on paper but completely ineffectual tooling to combat organized and systemic abuse. Given those limitations I find it hard to imagine Reddit modding ending up any other way.
	▲	AndrewKemendo 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Judge for yourself but I’m extremely proud of our community /r/ultramarathon We have a thriving supportive community that has been a support group for 100 thousand people that run or want to learn to run ultramarathons

▲

xvxvx 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reddit is my warning flag when AI gives me an answer. If I see Reddit linked, I know to disregard the answer entirely. They may as well be scraping 4chan.

▲

lostlogin 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you want a decent review of something, you could do a lot worse than Reddit.

But they do seem to be trying to destroy themselves at the moment.

▲

AndrewKemendo 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Common Crawl is heavily populated with reddit threads

So a massive chunk of LLMs are Reddit data

▲

ccgreg 7 hours ago | parent [-]

That isn't true. You're welcome to peruse our index to prove or disprove your claim.

▲

AndrewKemendo 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I appreciate the response because it made me go back and look at my sources.

What I conflated was that WebText utilizes Reddit links and data (mostly prior to 2023/4) and that I combined WebText and common crawl for the original GPT2 bootstrap into one dataset

I was incorrectly connecting Reddit-mediated WebText pipeline to Common Crawl. So thanks for the correction!

	▲	ccgreg 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Appreciate you double-checking.

▲

theyliesoeasily 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've been using reddit heavily since the early days.

Getting hit with a login screen on old.reddit.com this week made it really easy to quit.

o7 Aaron, I wish you could have kept creating great things for us. Somehow I think that's all you wanted. Instead we got the Sam Altman timeline. Oh well, we'll keep trying.

▲

Rabbit504030201 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I chceked the past price and, yes, the stock is back to what was it back in March this year. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RDDT/?guccounter=1 And there were swings close to as big as today since then. Not really much of news then.

▲

trentor 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe it's them getting more and more user hostile...

▲

aleen_oye 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was probably inevitable. If people get the answer from AI, fewer of them will click through to Reddit. The tricky part is that AI still depends on places like Reddit for the content in the first place.

▲

jnyst1985 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The only communities I still actively follow are football/soccer related. Not much slop there… yet.

▲

homeonthemtn 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's funny. As if the user growth was anything but bots anyways.

▲

Rabbit504030201 10 hours ago | parent [-]

proof?

▲

toomuchtodo 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Reddit considers Face ID to combat spam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47486731 - March 2026

Reddit is being spammed by AI bots, and it’s all Reddit’s fault - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44417497 - June 2025

Unauthorised AI Bots on Reddit are Eroding Sociality - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43821600 - April 2025

Reddit is full of bots: thread reposted comment by comment, 10 months later - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40211010 - April 2024

AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40136680 - April 2024

Is it me or is Reddit mostly bots now? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42258993 - November 2024

Has anyone noticed how overrun by bots Reddit has become? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443633 - September 2024

Detecting Russian Bots on Reddit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19719569 - April 2019

▲

Rabbit504030201 9 hours ago | parent [-]

"I personally am fairly convinced" "It was 100% obvious a few years ago that there was a lot of manipulation going on."

so no proof then

	▲	ricardobeat 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It takes three minutes of browsing Reddit to realize 1/3 of the top posts, and a lot of the comments are AI bots.
	▲	toomuchtodo 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Proof besides Reddit’s CEO considering biometrics to validate humans to combat bot spam? While our beliefs on this topic are irrelevant, it matters to those who might sign contracts with Reddit for their data for LLM training, otherwise they can generate slop to train on internally versus paying for Reddit’s slop from bot accounts. Reddit has limited enterprise value based on their low quality ads business, so proving humans are human is existential to the business. Their only value is capturing adults discussing various topics and selling access to that data as a product at the present moment.

▲

catlover76 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

▲

simianwords 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm tracking Reddit vs LLM thing somewhat. As much as I hate Reddit, I truly believe it is a net good and probably a big reason LLMs are useful now.

In my cute investigation, I found that only Claude doesn't have access to Reddit posts whereas every other app like Grok, ChatGPT indexes it.

https://simianwords.bearblog.dev/investigating-the-hidden-mo...

---

Reddit has unfortunately fallen into a local maxima of people with a certain type of progressive view and you would get heavily downvoted for anything that opposes it. Even the old adage of "reddit is the only place you can get organic reviews of products" doesn't hold up anymore. At the moment Reddit doesn't seem to offer anything other than a sort of anonymous Facebook groups thingy - subreddits for extremely niche hobbies and discussions on neighbourhoods like /r/berlin.

Other than that, what signal does Reddit really give? And where?