4 ms·

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

29 points by thm 2mo ago

xvxvx 2mo ago
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 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
  Common Crawl is heavily populated with reddit threads So a massive chunk of LLMs are Reddit data
  - ccgreg 2mo ago
    That isn't true. You're welcome to peruse our index to prove or disprove your claim.
    - AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
      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 2mo ago
        Appreciate you double-checking.
catlover76 2mo ago
[dead]
homeonthemtn 2mo ago
That's funny. As if the user growth was anything but bots anyways.
- Rabbit504030201 2mo ago
  proof?
  - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
    Reddit considers Face ID to combat spam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47486731 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44417497 - June 2025 Unauthorised AI Bots on Reddit are Eroding Sociality - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43821600 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 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443633 - September 2024 Detecting Russian Bots on Reddit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19719569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19719569 - April 2019
    - Rabbit504030201 2mo ago
      "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
      - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
        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.
Rabbit504030201 2mo ago
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 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 2mo ago
Maybe it's them getting more and more user hostile...
simianwords 2mo ago
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-moat-behind-all-the-llm-apps/ 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?
ricardobeat 2mo ago
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.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- r0fl 2mo ago
  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
  - lostlogin 2mo ago
    > Google is supposed to show the best content at the top Unless it’s showing adverts first.
  - brador 2mo ago
    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.
- AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
theyliesoeasily 2mo ago
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.
aleen_oye 2mo ago
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 2mo ago
The only communities I still actively follow are football/soccer related. Not much slop there… yet.

29 points by thm 2mo ago

xvxvx 2mo ago

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 2mo ago
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 2mo ago
Common Crawl is heavily populated with reddit threads So a massive chunk of LLMs are Reddit data
- ccgreg 2mo ago
  That isn't true. You're welcome to peruse our index to prove or disprove your claim.
  - AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
    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 2mo ago
      Appreciate you double-checking.

catlover76 2mo ago

[dead]

homeonthemtn 2mo ago

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

Rabbit504030201 2mo ago
proof?
- toomuchtodo 2mo ago
  Reddit considers Face ID to combat spam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47486731 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44417497 - June 2025 Unauthorised AI Bots on Reddit are Eroding Sociality - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43821600 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 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443633 - September 2024 Detecting Russian Bots on Reddit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19719569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19719569 - April 2019
  - Rabbit504030201 2mo ago
    "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
    - toomuchtodo 2mo ago
      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.

Rabbit504030201 2mo ago

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 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 2mo ago

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

simianwords 2mo ago

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-moat-behind-all-the-llm-apps/ 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?

ricardobeat 2mo ago

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.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
r0fl 2mo ago
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
- lostlogin 2mo ago
  > Google is supposed to show the best content at the top Unless it’s showing adverts first.
- brador 2mo ago
  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.
AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
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 2mo ago

theyliesoeasily 2mo ago

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.

aleen_oye 2mo ago

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 2mo ago

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