Oct 30 (Reuters) - Reddit shares tumbled 29% on Friday, marking their biggest single-day drop and hitting their lowest level in over a year, after the company warned that Google’s AI-powered search was hurting referral traffic and could shrink its user base.
The online discussion platform still appears in Google search results but is attracting fewer clicks, as users increasingly rely on the tech giant’s AI tools for direct answers.
“When more than a million search referrals a week disappear because Google’s AI answers the question itself, investors are no longer looking just at the next three or four months, but at how much of Reddit’s audience it will really own in the years ahead,” said Vitor Madeira, senior market specialist at Capital.com.
Reddit warned that its daily active unique visitors could fall by a low double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter if referral traffic kept declining.
If current losses hold, Reddit is set to lose more than $7 billion in market value and Pinterest about $900 million. The two stocks have fallen about 44% and 23%, respectively, this year through their last close.
Reddit has a 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio of 19.03, compared with Snap’s 7.53 and Pinterest’s 8.48, according to LSEG data.
Separately, Reddit on Friday said it has extended its cloud services agreement with Google through 2029, committing to spend $580 million over three years.
At least 11 brokerages cut their price targets on Reddit, and at least 13 did so on Pinterest.
Gosh. You mean making it harder and harder to access their platform without giving up anonymity is hurting their business model? Well jack me off and call me Betty. When will it all make sense.
You’re already paying for the hour Betty. "It’s $10 for a BJ, $12 for an HJ, $15 for a ZJ.
If you have to ask big man, you can’t afford it
Too many people block ads on reddit -> block the api -> people use google search and vpns -> block search and vpns unless logged in -> people use ai instead of search to find reddit answers because reddit blocks everything –> block access even harder -> complain no one visits the site anymore -> [we are here]
Only thing left to block are logins.
I honestly don’t know anyone that does anymore. I tried the bs for about 5 sec before I get prompted for ads for their app.
Not sure how that pops up with origin
I still log in every now and then on a browser to read the sports subs because lemmy sucks for that, but I refuse to install that cancer of an app.
I agree Lemmy sucks for sports subs, but I refuse to log in to Reddit. Because I refuse to login it has basically become unusable – so I don’t use it.
You forgot banning your userbase left and right.
Yep they hand out auto suspends and bans like it’s free candy.
I once got permabanned for harassment because I called a dude a dumbass in 2 different threads on a very small <1k daily users subreddit and they said I was “following him” and making “personal attacks”
AI bans, more like sudden acute “runs”
Oh yes, I know of that very well. The admins have crazy trigger fingers.
Also, the experience of new users is just utter garbage. When I finally successfully sidestepped their detection of ban evasion (clear cookies + random user agent + VPN), I noticed how terrible the new-user experience is. I am supposed to gain karma to post anything, but I can’t get karma, because my account is too new and every post and comment is hidden or automatically removed. ??? BUT THE ACTUAL BOTS ARE JUST GIVING EACHOTHER KARMA! This bot prevention bullshit hurts only humans. Utter garbage website, it’s doomed, but I wish it’d die faster.
i created an acc after 1+years of ashadowbanned, i only occasionaly go on niche subs, then after a while i use powersuite to nuke the comments.
Or shadowban you if you ever comment anything more divisive than “This content is great!”
Reddit used to be a place for discussion a long time ago, now it’s a place for bots and idiots to practice the form of discussion without ever holding any substance
Reddit used to be a place for discussion a long time ago, now it’s a place for bots and idiots to practice the form of discussion without ever holding any substance
This describes 90% (or more) of the modern internet.
Allowing stupid people to form large groups was a mistake. Sorry George. I know you warned us.
which funny enough made them lurkers.
And canning my girl Victoria
And the reddit gifts guy.
and more to the point multiple accounts per user, that likely wouldve interacted more subs than with 1 account.
also thier reddit app and thier new REDDIT UI on browser is very non-intuitive to use.
That damn “better on the app” popup completely freezes Firefox Focus on iOS.
There are times where I search something, there appears to be a reddit thread with a descriptive answer so I tap on it, I scroll down a couple swipes and boom, popup freezes the app. Can’t do anything to make the back button appear after scrolling hid it. All I can do is force close.
Use ublock origin and enable the annoyances blocklists. You’ll never see that reddit ad again
Thank you, I had been using uBlock origin but didn’t realize there was a setting for that. It worked immediately!
On Firefox, Desktop Mode usually fixes this.
Good. Let it burn to the ground
Have they tried making the UI shittier?
old.reddit, a clear example of don’t fix what ain’t broken
Reddit pre-IPO*
Do people on lemmy have memory loss? This isnt the first time someone claimed something old is actually new
People have been saying that the reddit app is unusable when the API pricing was announced
it’s always been total garbage, especially compared to the third party apps. some of them supported some native reddit features better than the official app.
Your mom called and she wants to know where you are.
They’re appealing to a different generation users. New reddit users think old reddit is ancient outdated design. They like the new design because it’s oriented to the internet generation that uses mobile UIs.
I hate it on browser too and is why I use redlib. So much wasted space with side padding filled with useless stuff on an already small screen.
its for the tiktok generation. this actually goes way back, when they were doing doomscrolling on another platform i was in before it was permanently shuttled.
All I get is a page telling me to login
Yeah old Reddit was locked up a few months ago. They don’t want people scraping and most new users use the ‘new’ interface.
You mean they used that as an excuse. The reality was probably that it was harder to monetize people using old reddit.
thats what they said, but it doesnt take much to make an account and scrape with that.
It’s still not great on mobile.
They should try alienating a bunch of their most active, long tenured users.
That might actually be an active strategy.
Making the UI worse so people have to click around more. Makes opportunity for more advertising, and makes it look like people are engaging more.
Never really thought about it that way.its peak enshittified, but i guess they can make it like tiktok, where you get interrupted every other AD posts/ai.
You say that…
I still use the app for 1 specific thing and let me tell you the iOS app (presumably their largest audience) is GARBAGE. And it gets worse every single release.
The latest release has a dead zone (!) in the list view. You’ll click a row/item and nothing happens. It only occurs after using the app for a bit and only in certain vertical place (about 20% down from the top). You have to scroll the list to be to click that item. Hilarious.
Of course all of this is on top the numerous other bugs.
Chrstian - ONE FUCKING GUY - made a superior app by himself. What did PewDiePie say, “it’s evolving, only backwards.”
I think it took them 4 years to get their video player working too. A video player.Their video player still doesn’t work
Their video player working would be news to me in 2026. I still have to download most videos in order to watch them.
I guess it worked for a couple days 🤷 thanks for the update, I have edited my comment
Ugh, on the theme of media, their image-hosting is so incredibly user-hostile.
I used image search to find something the other day, and the one I wanted was hosted on Reddit. But, it was impossible to see the whole image because Reddit insisted that the only way to see the image was with the whole forum around it, and the image resized to fit that view, with the top and bottom of the image cropped out. There was no way to actually see the full image with the top and bottom visible on Reddit. I had to actually download the image to see that part.
Devolution.
deleted by creator
Reddit’s failure was inevitable; once capital exerts excessive control, it’s time for people to leave. Everyone has surely had the infuriating experience of being bombarded by trashy ads on Reddit often with no human customer support available to address complaints. It has become a hub overrun by bots and scams; when you enter a subreddit, almost everything you see is just bots.
They also don’t let people lurk anymore.
We really do need to get back to a tech landscape where evil ceos are shunned and their products not used. We have tolerated the spez, musk, thiel, zuckerburg, ellison, bankman-fried, elizabeth holmes, Kalanich (uber), baszuskis (roblox) types for way too long. They are all a bunch of mega pricks and their companies should pay a penalty for their being openly evil.
Whats the point to appear in google search, when you gonna lock your platform to have accounts to view the content… Just asking.
Hey, its rude to expect spaz to think that far
The only way to build a profitable business today is to make it either: A) a scam, or B) gambling. Which to you think this one was?
If you guessed A) a scam, you are correct!
We are currently in the “dump” phase of the pump and dump.
Yep end stage capitalism produces absolutely nothing of value for anyone but the .1%.
I guessed “scambling” which is gambling, but also a scam.
Both
why not both, gambling and scamming.
Good. Fuck spez.
Fuck you u/spez. Fucking usurper.
Not only that, they’re mandating login. I think that was announced yesterday
If 80% of their advertising revenue comes from logged in users and they mandate login, soon 100% of their revenue will be logged in users. It won’t be more dollars than it is now, but they will have successfully stopped those other 20% from seeing ads.
Their whole philosophy is bizarre. Instead of letting a random from a Google search get lost in a series of recommended topics, browsing the sub, or searching for more stuff inside Reddit until they see an opinion they just need to respond to, they instead want to put up barriers to new user acquisition.
This is 100% to make it harder for non-paying AI scrapers. Their business is mostly selling data to LLM companies now. This won’t stop non-paying scrapers but now they will have to make accounts and it will be easier to spot and stop.
They are still shooting themselves in the foot by almost completely killing search engine traffic but this is their reasoning behind it. Once again a company killing their future for the quick buck.
The AI scrapers just make new user accounts anytime they need one. Requiring login barely even slows them down.
this has no effect on the scrapers , thats what spez is saying. you can simply automate account creation easily, plus they dont intend to keep these accounts long term anyways.
i think what really hurt them was banning people so much, people refuse to login anymore, to risk anymore bans from the purges last year. bots and ai slop took over almost immediately. i dont think they will relax thier “filters” anytime soon. even the spammers who earn money from reddit, are trying evade the filters by producing “organic traffic”
deleted by creator
If I were a stockholder, that’d be cause for me to sell. Reddit’s main value comes from the fact that it’s constantly acquiring new users, primarily from search engine results. Keeping users is easy enough (there are still people logging into Facebook every single day), but consistently gaining more users than losing year over year is an incredibly valuable metric to an investor. Mandatory logins would immediately bottleneck that incoming stream of users, does little to retain existing users, and is likely to scare off a statistically significant amount of existing users. This would be a huge red flag for me to dump my Reddit stock.
Keeping users is easy enough (there are still people logging into Facebook every single day),
That only works for Facebook because of network effects. Your aunt Bertha is on Facebook and won’t leave, and won’t use anything else. So, the only way to keep in touch with her is to stay on Facebook.
Are there really people on Reddit that you care about, and that you can’t otherwise keep in touch with?
The communities on Reddit are another matter. Some of the sports ones never migrated to Lemmy at all, so there isn’t a good way to discuss things there. There are a few others I miss. But, it’s not worth putting up with Reddit for them.
True. I used to launch Firefox in private mode to see if they had shadow banned one of my posts again (WAY too often, the answer was “yes”) and just about a week ago I could not do that any more and began insisting on a log on.
For other reasons, though, I’ve since committed a reddit suicide, insisted on a permaban (that was harder than I expected) and found y’all. I’m loving it.
Redlib still works for now.
I’ve been using https://redlib.catsarch.com/ and https://redlib.blueberry.reallyaweso.me/
Switching between the two when one of them doesn’t work.
Same, I’m done. I haven’t had an active account since the api bank. I was fine browsing old reddit on ff, but that’s gone.
Almost 20 years gone, I fucking hate this so much. They just couldn’t let it be with continual growth and now they’ll have nothing.
they practically forced it, old reddit wont stay long for logged in people.
deleted by creator
“When more than a million search referrals a week disappear because Google’s AI answers the question itself,
investors are no longer looking just at the next three or four months, but at how much of Reddit’s audience it will really own in the years ahead,”
said Vitor Madeira, senior market specialist at Capital.com.
Personally I am glad investors are worried they wont own enough users.
Also, didn’t Reddit close up and start charging for their API because of this exact issue and related AI stuff? Spez is now mad that there are effects from what they implemented?
I mean, what else were they expecting when they exchanged money for API access to a search engine that explicitly pushed their AI “answer” feature? I’m bewildered at how so many companies complain about not being able to see the consequences of their own actions that were told to their face would happen.
At this point there is no way this isn’t intentional from the start.
Reddit used to be a great free to use information source and community creation tool.
It was counter to the commoditization of both.
It was inevitable that capital interests would destroy it.
Good.
I enjoyed pre-COVID Reddit, where you could find all political stripes and religions, a virtual “melting pot”.
Today? It’s like Lemmy but with advertising. So much more homogeneous, and the moderators are deranged. Let them rule their dying empire with furry fists, have at it, it’s yours now
Reminded now, right before I left Reddit I was banned from r/pics for being a member somewhere that they don’t approve of, I can no longer recall which sub but it was lightly Republican flavored (my favorite political adversaries).
Why would they care? How would they know what the sub was intolerable without joining themselves? Why didn’t they ban themselves then? They were despoiled, like me.
Senseless. I haven’t visited since the login requirement, piss off
Today? It’s like Lemmy but with advertising. So much more homogeneous
Might have been a while since you visited it then, it’s getting increasingly absurdly right wing - mostly bots I’m guessing. Pretty much all of the main /r/all subs
Yep. Recently there was a post about the UK looking at raising the minimum wage to about £13.20 (17.50USD) an hour. On reddit it was endless comments complaining that minimum wage is too high. Most unhinged take I saw was that this will make the cost of living worse.
Yeah I haven’t been there for a couple of years. When I left it was a Democratic stronghold that had banned The Donald. Not as hard left as Lemmy, but close.
My ideal place would be “neutral” with all flavors, but I haven’t found anything like old Reddit yet, so I am taking a sabbatical here for as long as I am tolerated (probably another week)
Your posts here get banned for anti muslim hatred and terroristic zionism. Hopefully it wont take a whole week for a siteban for people like you.
It’s like Lemmy but with advertising.
Especially compared to https://old.lemmy.world/
The moderators on Reddit have been a pain for a long time. Here was always so much drama
I haven’t used Reddit with an account for months because they’re dead set on attaining my ID just to give me access to my damn account
I found that, if they’re asking for ID, you’re about to get banned. They do that to make ban evading harder.
It’s still surprising to me that 2 years later, it’s still double the value it was when it went public.
There was never any believable story where they would go public and become profitable.
Maybe if you’re worried about decreasing traffic don’t require an account just to read something on the internet.
