Still upset over removal of 3rd party clients. Screw you Steve.

AI slop posts farming karma so they can do scams and political post floods during an election season mean all of the discussion on any of the hobbyist forums is basically garbage. You get the same low effort obvious bot posts pretty much everywhere. Besides that there's the usual outrage porn all over the place designed to get you all angry so you will engage.

All that stuff was always a bit of a problem but the AI chat bots have made it so much worse.

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Wonders why traffic is down....

AI is the enemy!

Soon, "Reports AI bots all over Reddit, Reddit states increase in users is massive!"

Reddit's CEO is questioning the value of Google's AI? Based on the amount of AI garbage being posted on the site, one would assume that Reddit is completely fine with AI and its contributions to Reddit in general.

Going to Reddit for human content is like going to fried chicken place for their salad - yes it exists but its a side dish and crammed with a ton of unhealthy stuff.

Reddit's problems have nothing to do with Google and everything to do with gross incompetence.

I've been a prolific Redditor for some 10-15 years. That ended overnight when they stopped allowing anonymous access to old.reddit.com. If I and a handful of fellow geeks were the only holdouts against their god-awful "new" experience, that wouldn't matter. Problem is, the vast majority of Reddit's mods are - were - in the same camp.

Accordingly, Reddit has effectively rolled over and surrendered to the bots, and now Spez wonders why their stock price is tanking? They have bots policing bots posting for bots learning from bots and arguing with bots. Far from improving the situation, AI has made the whole mess even harder for the rapidly dwindling pool of humans to deal with.

MMW, a year from now Reddit will be nothing more than playground for AIs. Whether or not it remains viable as a company largely depends on how long they can hide that information from investors and advertisers.

They want to stop Google from scraping and presenting Reddit posts as results. But turning off google scraping makes it impossible to search for your content for 90% of the web users, who all use google.

At the same time, you've enshittified Reddit to the point where you *block* people on mobile from viewing posts in an attempt to force the use of your horrible app, driving away potential users.

This isn't a real business model. Reddit tried to monetize themselves and didn't have any idea how to do it. They continue to shoot themselves in the foot. Their single STRENGTH, the long-term searchable content viewable by users, has been shot in the foot by restricting mobile viewing while the google scrapers have no such limitation. This literally drives people to simply stop at the google AI summary and not even bother with the reddit site.

with Reddit *is* Steve Huffman. Reddit has always been a D+ website. A lot of good information hidden among useless information and an absolute trash UI/UX. He doesn't understand how to run a website, let alone an entire business.

I will say this... as a long time mod for some popular communities, Reddit has really refined their content management systems and they do have the capability to restrict AI slop if they want to. It will be interesting to see if they can reliably do this in a way to avoid being contaminated?

Reddit sad that stock falling because competition competes with useful stuff people actually use. But Reddit doesn't want people to be misled into liking what they actually like. Listen to Reddit, don't believe your lying eyes. In my own recent use, Google AI answers have overall proven to be useful, not perfect, for solving many daily Linux configuration issues of various apps and tools. I deleted my Reddit account and posts years ago when they banned 3rd party clients. I still "redd" the content once in

With links to trust but verify. And google should pay their sources.

It's Reddit.

Outside of the rare niche subreddits which:

1) Aren't full of a$$holes

2) Don't have a moderator on a power trip

3) Actually provide useful information

The majority of Reddit is a toxic echo chamber full of folks who will

karma bomb you into oblivion the moment you dare say anything that

doesn't jive with current group-think.

I laughed when they went public and I will continue to laugh as

that ship slowly sinks into the ocean of forgotten web sites.

( Say hello to MySpace when you get there :P )

Reddit's business model is stealing content and discussion from other sites and maintaining it on their own. So now he gets millions from Google to scape the content of Reddit to train AI but is upset that the same AI he's training then results in them getting less traffic, so that he can then syphon off the traffic from other sites who actually created the content? Wow.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman criticized Google's AI Overviews for summarizing publishers' content without delivering the traffic benefits of traditional search, arguing that users increasingly value Reddit's human perspectives and firsthand experiences.

This is ironic. Reddit’s core value comes entirely from unpaid volunteers and cryptocurrency “investments” and set of power mods that maintain ideological purity. Reddit is essentially worthless.

If you step out of line, even a little, against the accepted narratives on subreddits, get ready to be harassed, bullied, and banned. Reddit still has some truly awesome subs with great communities, but all the major ones (/humor comes to mind) are sad shells of their former selves.

Most popular subreddits are overrun with bots. r/politics and r/conservative are notorious hives of bots regurgitating talking points at each other. Discussions of Israel and China are always hit by bots spreading the same propaganda. And every little sub is getting hit by bots recycling old posts. If reddit is supposed to be a place for humans then the company sucks at it.

(Most) Reddit threads, or Google AI summaries?