Reddit CEO says chatbots are not a traffic driver | Hacker News Reader

Reddit CEO says chatbots are not a traffic driver

techcrunch.com

5 pointsmikhael11 comments

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I want to thank reddit for imposing limits on the exposure of their content to LLM scrapers.

> What’s more, Reddit is experimenting with a new and simpler onboarding flow to increase early user engagement.

Calling it now - depreciation of old.reddit.com with simultaneous rollout of a login wall like X.

Honestly it's about time.

There is no free lunch and I would rather have to login to see content than have ai scrapers grabbing content

Reddit is partially owned by Sam Altman and they have deals with llm companies to sell the data. The content has been and will continue to be grabbed by everyone who can pay.

This.

If you really care about your content being scraped, you better start reading every TOS for the sites you frequent.

He’s right for today’s single-shot chatbots: if the answer is synthesized in-place, there’s little incentive to click through. The shift will come from agentic LLMs and multi-agent systems that plan, browse, cite, and hand off—e.g., parallel agentic AI that retrieves, verifies, and selects authoritative links, then routes users to the source. When models are rewarded for attribution and task completion (not just word prediction), distributed agentic AI can become a net traffic driver to forums like Reddit.

I think there is an opportunity for GenAI chatbot platforms to offer something similar to Quora, Stackoverflow, Reddit, etc and then train on it. answers.tld.com, for example. Human mods curate and perform QA (assisted with LLMs), and the models are built off of the corpus. Reddit is trying to turn into ChatGPT using Reddit Answers, when OpenAI and other platforms already have the traffic, MAUs, and investment.

As seen with the many examples of this that have come before it I.e stack exchange and reddit answers etc… nobody is in anyway even remotely motivated to put in the time and effort to offer their expertise to have someone else steal it for their own greedy profit seeking reasons.

You’re asking people to willingly sign up to be robbed and receive no compensation or credit in return.

Offer them free access to the robot if they meet contribution and quality requirements. 8.5+ billion people in the world, I’m sure you can find takers, just as Wikipedia has an army of dedicated volunteers.

Voluntary knowledge contributions are not theft, so provide the opportunity and see what happens. “Build the machine that builds the machine.”

People WERE happy to do the Wikipedia model but you won’t find anyone who is willing to do it now purely to make someone else rich and you’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise..

https://theamericanscholar.org/baby-shoggoth-is-listening/ from https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/writing-for-the-ais mentions writers specifically tailoring their work for AI, so I think there is a cohort out there who will write for the robot to train on.

If I use a chatbot it’s precisely to avoid going to your website. Have you tried using it from a mobile device without an account and ad blocker? You will quickly understand why people don’t want to go to your website.

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