Reddit has become known as the place to go for unfiltered answers from real, human users. But as the site celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, the company is increasingly thinking about how it can augment that human work with AI.
The initial rollout of AI tools, like Reddit Answers, is “going really well,” CTO Chris Slowe tells The Verge. At a time when Google and its AI tools are going to Reddit for human answers, Reddit is going to its own human answers to power AI features, hoping they’re the key to letting people unlock useful information from its huge trove of posts and communities.
Reddit Answers is the first big user-facing piece of the company’s AI push. Like other AI search tools, Reddit Answers will show an AI-generated summary to a query. But Reddit Answers also very prominently links to where the content came from — and as a user, you also know that the link will point you to another place on Reddit instead of some SEO-driven garbage. It also helps that the citations feel much more prominent than on tools like Google’s AI Mode — a tool that news publishers have criticized as “theft.”
“If you just want the short summary, it’s there,” Slowe says. “If you want to delve deeper, it’s an easier way to get into it.”
In order for those AI answers to be useful, they need to continue to be based on real human responses. Reddit now has to be on the lookout for AI-generated comments and posts infiltrating its site. It’s an important thing for the platform to stay on top of, says Slowe: Reddit’s key benefit is that you can trust that a lot of what’s written on it is written by humans, and AI spam could erode that. “Trust is an essential component of the way Reddit works,” Slowe says. The platform is using AI and LLMs to help with moderation and user safety, too.
The other half of Reddit’s AI equation is selling its own data, which is extremely valuable to AI giants. The changes that forced notable apps to shut down and spurred widespread user protests (which Slowe referred to as “some unpleasantness that happened about two years ago”) were positioned by CEO Steve Huffman as more of a way to get AI companies to pony up. And two of the biggest companies have already done so, as Reddit has cut AI deals with both Google and OpenAI. But Reddit also has to be on the lookout for improper use of its data, with the most recent crackdown being its lawsuit against Anthropic.
“At the end of the day, we aren’t a charity,” Slowe says. Reddit wants to provide a service that people can use for free, “but don’t build your business on our back and expect us not to try and defend ourselves.”
Still, with new AI-powered search products from Google, OpenAI, and others on the rise, Reddit risks getting buried by AI summaries. And Reddit is experimenting with AI-powered searches on its own platform. So what’s the company’s goal for the future?
“Keep allowing Reddit to be Reddit,” Slowe says. “I think that the underlying model for Reddit hasn’t really drastically changed since the early days.” The platform doesn’t require real names (your username is a “coveted thing” that many people keep private, Slowe says), everything is focused on text, and reputation is more important than who you are; all of these elements marked “a drastic difference with the rest of social media.”
Reddit is also facing competition from a slightly different angle: Digg, which is making a return with the backing of founder Kevin Rose and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Slowe didn’t have much to say about it, though. “I always love seeing innovation and I always love seeing new bends on old business models.”
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