As Reddit stock falls, CEO questions value of Google's AI Overviews | Hacker News Reader

As Reddit stock falls, CEO questions value of Google's AI Overviews

arstechnica.com

13 pointsBrajeshwar12 comments

I can’t stand AI overviews in almost all situations. There’s something both untrustworthy about it and also the idea that something is being shoved down my throat, like someone is trying to tell me how to think. Plus it basically spoils any kind of discovery, I don’t need the internet treating me like a caricature of an executive that needs everything to cut to the heart of the matter, I’m mostly browsing the internet for leisure anyway, and even if I’m not I want to see the nuance myself.

Any “summarize with AI” is clearly one of those solution looking for a problem things, AI can do it so it gets added in whether anyone wants it or not.

Sometimes a user-initiated overview is helpful to winnow wheat from chaff. Even when I'm using a filter for better material like HN, most of the articles (really, the authors) seem unable to get to the f— point. I blame, in equal shares, the attention economy and lack of writing skills.

I finally lost patience and set up a bookmarklet that grabs the current URL, opens a new tab, plops the URL into a Kagi Assistant prompt (using DeepSeek V4 Flash) along with the phrase "What's the point?", and sends it off. It seems to give better results than the vanilla Kagi Summarizer.

They’re pushing existing users away, and are downright hostile to new users due to all the anti-spam measures… but it’s Google’s fault…

Well, they pivoted from a discussion forum, to a frozen dump of past discussions to be sold to Google, specifically, for AI training. In that sense, it is Google's fault that Google isn't giving them more money.

Their hostility is because they own sometging thats akin to a public utility and it can only be mined for monetary gain that destroys its value.

Reddit of ten years ago focused on connecting users with the ideal user to communicate with. Modern Reddit focuses on connecting users with the ideal piece of information to read.

I don't know how they managed to make that change, when they were trying to optimize for user interaction, but it's the change they made, so now there's nothing unique about Reddit and a scrape of the information is just as useful.

If someone comes up with a good platform for online forums, there's a lot of potential to take over Reddit's husk.

Folks, as fun as it is to harp on Reddit, much of the web has felt a sharp decline due to the intermediaries either scanning content and presenting it at their shopfront, or in the case of something like YouTube and other creative spaces, outright stealing the voice, look, and other features of the people involved.

There is a problem, but pointing at Reddit and laughing as some kind of schadenfreude at this point means it’s a matter of time before it is pointed at you.

I agree to some extent—the bulk of the real damage came from Google declaring war on the open web and companies like Facebook manipulating the ad market to harm publishers (pivot to video fraud)—but Reddit saw that happening and decided to join in. They torched one of the best and most loyal communities rather than pushing back against the scrapers, and that really caps the amount of sympathy I have for them.

I get that. All the stupid things that Reddit did along the way, the redesign, the login/app wall, the Pao thing, now requiring login when using ‘old.’, and the lack of the actual community standing up, points to the leadership that it is acceptable to do these things if it means more money for shareholders. So did they torch it if everyone stayed and continued? Hard to say.

Having said that, let’s suppose Reddit did everything right. They would still be overwhelmed by bots. Their inventory of comments and threads would still be copied over to LLMs just like how all the books and movies and music has been copied over. So ultimately this call that occurred where they cite numbers are down would still happen. Not 100% guaranteed of course, but highly likely.

This was flagrant disregard for copyright by all these AI firms, done much around the same time. It was a coordinated move in private, meanwhile the public face they give of being competitors, not speaking to each other, not shaking hands, is pure play. It’s theatrics because it helps them as a group if they’re seen to be enemies.

They’d still be going down paths like mandatory logins and aggressive bot blocking, but I think it’d be different if they still had the trust of most users. The moderator community was something rare and special — a ton of skilled people working pro bono to make their site a community — and I don’t think it will ever come back short of a C-level sea change. Most of those people were the front line of defense against slop.

I am not sure there is a good solution for filtering out a synthetic content. AI detectors became basically useless, giving false positives a lot. Even human verification does not help - nobody prevents verified account to start using bots.

The AI overviews are utter bullshit. Either old ,unrelated information or wrong.

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