Reddit Will Soon Try Out AI Summaries (and Possibly a Paywall)
Reddit may soon lock certain subreddits behind a paywall , but at least it’s testing AI-powered searches.
In Reddit’s second call with investors since its IPO earlier this year, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman focused on ways to make money. While the company is gradually moving toward more profitable strategies, such as the notoriously unpopular paywalled API , most of the changes so far have not directly impacted the desktop site. Now Huffman says Reddit is also considering a paywall for content.
“I think the existing altruistic free version of Reddit will continue to exist, grow and thrive,” Huffman said. (I believe ad-supported content is altruistic now). “But now we’ll open the door to new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be created that can have exclusive content or private areas and things like that.”
Huffman’s comment has users worried about being empty, but eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a small silver lining. While the executive is promoting the idea of premium content, the repeated use of the word “new” seems to at least imply that the site won’t put existing subreddits behind a paywall—a particularly important note given how much of the site is user-owned. “Whenever we add a new way to use Reddit… it expands Reddit,” Huffman explained. “We didn’t see it cannibalizing existing Reddit.” However, this hasn’t stopped users from expressing concern as a popular comment has appeared on the r/tech subreddit, which states: “All the CEOs are rushing to see who can destroy their platform.” the fastest,” and another phrase: “Who’s going to pay for this crap?”
The move to paid content will follow another lucrative decision: a $60 million annual deal with Google that will allow the newly created monopoly to access Reddit data to train AI. Following the deal, Reddit results also began disappearing from other search engines, with Huffman later saying that the companies behind those engines would have to make similar deals in order to display Reddit results in their search results.
Huffman said this was meant to allow the company to have a say in how its data is used now that AI datasets can train on it, but payday would probably be a good thing too.
Reddit’s increasing difficulty in searching the Internet may partly explain the recent user frustration, although Huffman has a solution for that problem as well. Say it with me again: AI. In the same call, the CEO suggested that the site would begin testing AI-powered search results pages that would “summarize and recommend content” to help users “dive deeper” into Reddit.
The executive didn’t say much more, other than to explain that the feature will use some third-party and some proprietary technology. He also didn’t give a clear timetable, simply saying that experiments would begin later this year.