alt Hacker News> Reddit traffic is down and management blames AI search not referring users to Reddit.
Couldn't have anything to do with management's decision to require logins to access the site.
Replies
Sample size of one: this decision has resulted in me accessing Reddit exactly zero times since the implementation. And no I will not use the “new” UI.
This has actually been a time saver, and I haven’t missed it even for research. In fact it’s made me realize just how bad Reddit was as a source for research, these days. It’s all bots and activists with an axe to grind.
Not sure the required-login thing is at fault here at least at scale.
I myself do way more searches in "<question> on Reddit" and then just look at the AI generated response from Google Gemini.
Zero clicks.
I assume you mean the already-imposed login-wall for old.reddit.com? AFAIK the login-wall for everything hasn't started rolling out.
Or the site being infested with bots and generally getting slowly shittier?
Didn't they sign a huge deal with Google a while back to let them train on reddit data? Did they not understand that if their content was in google ai google would send them less traffic?
I haven't used it for months since the admins permabanned by 15 year old account for citing a controversial wikipedia article directly related to a controversial UK news story on a UK news subreddit.
Kinda annoyed me because I am more aligned with the normie take and was just steel-manning in good faith – which was clear from my comment and made clear again in my appeal.
To be fair though, apparently there are topics which are not allowed to be discussed on Reddit and I naively didn't realise this.
Topically—the whole reason for the login walls was to fulfill the requirements of their Google/OpenAI data deals. OpenAI wanted to pull up the ladder behind them.
It's a very typical failure mode for publicly-traded companies. For a CEO to have the incentive to do something that will kill their company, in a few quarters' time—in exchange for a one-off windfall that will boost the stock price, CEO compensation, &c. Short-termism at the "eating the golden goose" level.
> [May 2024] "In its IPO prospectus, Reddit revealed that it has contractual agreements to license its data to customers including Google worth a combined over $200 million. And, in its first earnings report as a public company, Reddit reported a 450% year-over-year increase in non-ad revenue, attributable mainly to those agreements."
> "Reddit stock was up 11% in extended trading following the announcement of the OpenAI deal."
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/16/openai-inks-deal-to-train-...