Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stands on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after ringing a bell on the floor setting the share price at $47 in its initial public offering (IPO) on March 21, 2024 in New York City.
For 20 years, Reddit has pitched itself as "the front page of the internet." AI threatens to change that.
As social media has changed over the past two decades with the shift to mobile and the more recent focus on short-form video, peers like MySpace, Digg and Flickr have faded into oblivion. Reddit, meanwhile, has refused to die, chugging along and gaining an audience of over 108 million daily users who congregate in more than 100,000 subreddit communities. There, Reddit users keep it old school and leave simple text comments to one another about their favorite hobbies, pastimes and interests.
Those user-generated text comments are a treasure trove that, in the age of artificial intelligence, Reddit is fighting to defend.
The emergence of AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini threaten to inhale vast swaths of data from services like Reddit. As more people turn to chatbots for information they previously went to websites for, Reddit faces a gargantuan challenge gaining new users, particularly if Google's search floodgates dry up.
CEO Steve Huffman explained Reddit's situation to analysts in May, saying that challenges like the one AI poses can also create opportunities.
While the "search ecosystem is under heavy construction," Huffman said he's betting that the voices of Reddit's users will help it stand out amid the "annotated sterile answers from AI."
Huffman doubled down on that notion last week, saying on a podcast that the reality is AI is still in its infancy.
"There will always be a need, a desire for people to talk to people about stuff," Huffman said. "That is where we are going to be focused."
Huffman may be correct about Reddit's loyal user base, but in the age of AI, many users simply "go the easiest possible way," said Ann Smarty, a marketing and reputation management consultant who helps brands monitor consumer perception on Reddit. And there may be no simpler way of finding answers on the internet than simply asking ChatGPT a question, Smarty said.
"People do not want to click," she said. "They just want those quick answers."