The dream of an open internet continues to die following the news that Reddit will begin forcing people to be logged in to an account in order to browse its trove of arcane user insights and discussions. The reason seems clear: Google AI overviews are robbing the platform blind.
“While extraordinarily useful and powerful, AI search solves a different problem than Reddit,” Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman told investors during the company’s quarterly earnings call this week. “AI does not fulfill people’s fundamental need for community, connection, and belonging with other people, and it lacks context and nuance.”
To help protect “the Reddit corpus of data,” the company will begin shifting to a “logged-in only experience.” Testing will begin in other countries in the fourth quarter before a switch is eventually flipped for every Reddit user everywhere beginning in 2027. Despite revenue and profits both growing during the third quarter, and the company claiming that logged-in users already account for 80 percent of Reddit’s monetization, its stock fell off a cliff following the announcement.
It nose-dived over 25 percent in after-hours trading after already being down significantly from the start of the year. Transforming Reddit into a “logged-in only experience” essentially undercuts its claims to being the “front page of the internet” and will seemingly lead to a massive drop in casual users coming to the platform to exchange random answers to the most random questions.
The irony of the whole thing is that Reddit previously cut deals with OpenAI and Google to let the companies train on its valuable “corpus of data.” And the thing that has subsequently happened, as anyone who gave it any thought could have predicted at the time, is that the AI giants now threaten to cannibalize Reddit rather than enter into a symbiotic relationship predicated on mutual growth.
Reddit is far from the first company to try to block the vast and growing army of online AI bots scraping its data for free. The “logged-in only experience” is akin to Amazon blocking Meta’s Muse AI agents from buying stuff on its platform. While new AI models are clearly becoming much more powerful, it’s far from obvious how they can start generating trillions in new value if they can’t keep stealing everyone else’s stuff.