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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
> Google is supposed to show the best content at the top
Unless it’s showing adverts first.
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.
I’d argue moderators taking themselves too seriously is precisely reddits problem, but okay.
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.
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
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.
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.
Common Crawl is heavily populated with reddit threads
So a massive chunk of LLMs are Reddit data
That isn't true. You're welcome to peruse our index to prove or disprove your claim.
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!
Appreciate you double-checking.
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.
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.
Maybe it's them getting more and more user hostile...
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.
The only communities I still actively follow are football/soccer related. Not much slop there… yet.
That's funny. As if the user growth was anything but bots anyways.
proof?
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
"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
It takes three minutes of browsing Reddit to realize 1/3 of the top posts, and a lot of the comments are AI bots.
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.
[dead]
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?