New York Magazine, no paywall – Reddit is one of the last thriving islands of the old web. Can it survive AI? It doesn’t really matter who you are, how you spend your time online, or what you imagine your relationship with the internet to be. However you scroll, wherever you browse, and whatever you want to see on your screens, it has probably happened to you, and if you haven’t noticed yet, you may now: Your world has become more Reddit. The 20-year-old platform, which began as a niche link aggregator and gradually grew into the web’s default community of communities, has gone from optional to inescapable, its little red alien logo manifesting no matter which way you look. For my zoomer cousin, a professional TikToker who was still learning to read when Reddit was founded, it’s obviously “the only place where you know there are real people.” For 82-year-old user LogyBayer, who grew up programming FORTRAN on punch-card computers in the 1960s, Reddit, where he has posted thousands of times, is the closest thing he can find to “the wondrous world of Usenet,” the online discussion system that predates the web. Many of the less online people I know, who had maybe heard of Reddit, are now tapping through threads about life advice and HVAC repair; at the same time, some of the most online people I know, who for years saw Reddit as a sort of internet playpen, a meme aggregator downstream of more vital communities, are now logging in daily. It’s happened to me, too, a screen-addled tech reporter who has been covering the platform’s growth — and various problems — for well over a decade with at least notional remove: When it’s time again to pick up that phone and incinerate a few more seconds of my one life on earth, more often than not, I shovel them into Reddit. This isn’t just a feeling. Reddit, after two decades of gradual and uneven growth, is exploding. According to Similarweb, it’s one of the largest properties online; if you take away social apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and utilities like Google and ChatGPT, its closest competition among websites is Wikipedia. In 2023, according to the company, Reddit had around 60 million unique visitors a day; its latest earnings report puts the number at 108 million a day, 400 million a week, and, according to conservative estimates, well over a billion different people using it every month. About those earnings reports: In 2024, Reddit went public. Its stock price popped, then climbed alongside its traffic. Revenue is way up, and after years of losses, the company eked out a slim profit in the last quarter. Why now? Reddit’s co-founder and current CEO, Steven Huffman, suggests the answer is obvious. “When we started Reddit, it was a web page of 25 links from around the internet,” he says. “Now, 20 years later, you’re stumbling into some thread where people are telling stories they’ve never told before and it drifts into life advice for someone who lives 2,000 miles away.” He didn’t see that coming, he says, but “in hindsight, it actually makes a lot of sense.”Reddit’s place in the collapsing web is both valuable and risk-laden. Google’s response to the gradual breakdown of the digital commons has been to send more and more people to Reddit, where relevant results are at least probably written by human beings, lavishing the site with traffic but binding the companies’ fates together…

Reddit’s relationship with AI is similarly tense: As a training corpus, Reddit is immensely valuable; after years of unauthorized scraping, the company has official licensing deals with Google, which sometimes turns its content into AI-generated search “Answers,” and with OpenAI, which uses Reddit’s vast archives to give its chatbot depth and outside sourcing and to help it sound like a normal person — or at least a normal redditor. Meanwhile, Reddit moderators are battling a flood of inauthentic content generated by chatbots that were trained, of course, on Reddit. They’re getting tired while users, less certain that other commenters are real — and less sure of their ability to tell and noticing the rising tides of slop elsewhere — are drifting into mutual suspicion…”