AI Loves Reddit, but Redditors Aren't So Sure

Have you ever asked an AI chatbot to give you a list of recommendations? Maybe something like, "What are some good restaurants in Mexico City? Or what are some family Halloween costume ideas? Or what's the best product to get this mustard stain out of my shirt?" If you've done this, there's a good chance the chatbot is getting its ideas from Reddit. "Artificial intelligence, Google Gemini, Claude, they scan the internet. They look for high-trustworthy sites. And they scrape that content and they use that to make their answers. And Reddit has proven to be a really important place for that." That's our colleague Katie Dayton. She says that Reddit, "With years and years of posts from real people about a huge mix of stuff, is a gold mine for a large language model." Before we even had LLMs and chatbots that we were using all the time, people would go on to Google and they would go, "Take me to Reddit." Like, "I know that I will get a straightforward answer that will be crowdsourced by the human population and I don't think I'm going to get caught out by any, you know, subliminal marketing." This role that Reddit is playing in AI is a game changer for the platform, and it's also causing brands to rethink how they participate on Reddit. Brands suddenly care about Reddit after years and years, you know, decades of brands not really thinking too much about this platform. However, advertising is the thing that maybe threatens what is Reddit at its core, which is honesty, real people, and no kind of manipulation of what you see on that platform. Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Monday, August 31st. Coming up on the show, the battle over the soul of Reddit. For the uninitiated, can you tell me about how Reddit works? Reddit is an absolute massive amalgamation of various subreddits, so you often go to a particular category of interest for you. One of my favorites is a subreddit called TV Too High, where. TV Too High. TV Too High. So there's a big community of people out there that think people are placing their TVs too high on the wall. Oh, yes. They do. Definitely. I remember the first time that I hung a TV on the wall, I sat down on the couch. I hung it to me standing, and I sat down on the couch, I was like, "Oh no, what have I done?" Right, and if you have a fireplace in your room, unfortunately, there's often no other place to put it. They hate that. Reddit users are passionate, and there's a subreddit for nearly everything. Whether it's about how high up you hang your TV, or energy drinks, anime, or even spicier stuff, and I'm not going to mention on this family-oriented podcast. Reddit, for a while, was kind of known as. For people with nerdy episodes, right? Science, and, you know, we're not safe for work stuff. And maybe for a long time, brands saw it as not brand safe. Reddit, to some people, is a representation of what the old internet used to be. Which is, like, it looks like a chat room. It's very text-based. It's people have their own personalities on there. And it's so undisrupted by advertisers. Whereas, it's extremely common on Instagram. It's just almost expected that your favorite influencers are one day going to say, "I love this Chlorox spray to clean my kitchen counters." Yeah, to the point where, you know, users on Instagram, they celebrate when their favorite creator gets a brand deal and starts selling them things. That's not the Kate's Unread it, and people on Reddit are so highly attuned to being sold to. And it's this sort of democracy on there that, where I think if that did start to happen, if there was a beloved redditor that started posting on behalf of the brand, and it was pretty obvious, people would just take them down pretty quickly. Reddit, of course, has its own advertising division too. So that is where a brand can go to the company, pay it to run and add, and those ads appear within the feed. And they are badged as such. They're badged as advertising, but in terms of posting organically, it has been historically just not a platform that brands have prioritized. But that's changing, especially after major deals Reddit signed with Google and OpenAI in 2024, that allow the tech giants to scrape Reddit and use its content to train their AI models. What is so appealing to AI companies about Reddit's content? It has been on the internet for a really long time now compared to most websites. It first went live in 2005. So it's got 20 plus years of people posting. It's very honest. It's a lot of like real people's reviews and real people's knowledge. And because of the way it works and the up voting and the down voting system, which basically means if lots of people like what you say, it goes to the top and it kind of gains more prominence. It's an easier way for the machines to tell what's good and what's bad. Exactly. What's right and what's wrong. What's true and what's false. So how important has the relationship become for LLM's and Reddit? Very important. Very important. I mean, Reddit is from this time of recording still the most cited website for chatbots across the internet. This means that all those brands who for years overlooked Reddit are now banging down Reddit store executives high up at companies, you know, they're all trying to use AI right now, right? So they've started to notice Reddit because of that, right? They'll see it's a citation. And then I think they've gone, wait, well, hang on a second. Like, why isn't if I type in, you know, if I was a, a mic, a microwave brand and I type in, hey, what's the best microwave? And I've noticed my company's not coming up. So I'm going to turn to my marketing team or my web team and go, well, how do we make that happen? Let's get on Reddit. And what's motivating them isn't that they're trying to reach the Reddit audience. It's that they're trying to sort of incept an idea into the LLM's brain using Reddit as the backdoor. Exactly. Exactly. And you know, there are brands out there that realize the Reddit as a platform itself as a place to reach. Reddit is very important and they're trying to do that the right way, but there are a lot of brands that are going to the platform in order to influence LLM results. To be clear, Reddit isn't the only place the companies are trying to manipulate in order to improve answers and chatbots. There's a whole cottage industry of businesses that look for ways to do this. And even go as far as creating websites with top 10 lists with their own brands on top. A spokesman for Reddit said, quote, "If you're coming to our platform as a way to hack the results on another platform, it's usually going to wind up with unhappy results." For brands that are trying, though, they're finding a big obstacle on Reddit. The human moderator. That's next. Have you seen Inception? Yes. A long time ago. And this is the Leonardo DiCaprio movie where they try to go into people's dreams to Incept ideas so that they think that the ideas actually came from themselves and they were influenced. It seems like that's now happening with AI chatbots. If they were really bad at doing Inception. If they went into their dreams and started shouting it and added them. Yeah. Like a brand ambassador with a big smile on a company t-shirt shouting, "You're going to love this new detergent." Yeah. And then someone in their dream takes a gun out and shoots them. I think that's the kind of bridge demonstration of what's happening. That's the moderator coming in and saying, "Absolutely not. You're not incepting this dream." Moderators are human volunteers who run each subreddit. They come up with each subreddit's guidelines and have the power to kick anyone out who doesn't follow them. This is a key to Reddit. The actual management of Reddit doesn't really get involved too much in the content. They've built up this ecosystem. They've sort of diversified their power sources amongst the population. And these people are, if you're a moderator, you get to basically make the rules and moderators do not want their feeds that they've curated over years and years and they've made all these rules. And suddenly users that pretend to be users but are really run by a brand company to disrupt that. I spoke to a moderator about how AI-obsessed brands are changing Reddit. I think the reason AI is kind of pulling from Reddit is because of the human touch to it, the genuine people that share their experiences and reviews. I feel like it's probably one of the last places on the internet where you can do so. That's Susan Burday. She helps run a few different subreddits, including the jewelry subreddit. What does a moderator of a subreddit do? So we basically make sure that the thread is, like, a place where people can feel safe to post, sharing anything they want to share. So basically we just approved posts. We could, like, remove posts. We could, like, ask somebody, like, "Hey, please don't be rude to someone, please don't like, curse someone out." Like, we're kind of like the babysitters just to make sure that, like, things don't go crazy. There's not a lot of spam posts. How do you describe what this online jewelry community is like? So it's a really big mixture. A lot of it is very, a lot of excitement. People are sharing something they purchase. They show and tell. They really get excited about, you know, milestones in their life. And then there's posts that people are trying to warn other users, perhaps not a great experience. Mm-hmm. They say, "Hey, this juror gave me something that wasn't great or I didn't get customer service." Exactly. It's a place for them to really come to the community and share what happened or what their experience happened. A big aspect of our/jewelry, as subreddits are known, is those product reviews. And Susan says it's not uncommon to have a company reach out to the moderators, asking to take down negative reviews about their products, usually Susan and her fellow moderators saying no. Earlier this year, one big jewelry company caught her attention, brilliant earth. She posted a job opening for a Reddit strategist, someone who will help brilliant earth improve its image on Reddit, and therefore improve its standing in AI search results. The posting specifically highlighted that influencing large language models was part of the goal. I was kind of shocked because it's a really big company and I didn't realize that our subreddit would be so seen or lurked by these companies. But it was even on the radar, essentially. Yeah, exactly so it kind of felt like we were being seen in a way where I thought it was just more so like people in our community talking about things. So the fact that these companies are keeping an eye out on the posts and stuff was very interesting to me. She consulted with her fellow moderators and they decided to issue a community warning. A post went up on our/jewelry with a flashing red siren emoji. It said quote, "If there's a sudden wave of positive brilliant earth content on here, you might not be coincidental." We pinned it on our subreddit just to kind of show we're not really welcoming this kind of position and we wanted to turn any other companies to take this approach. We much prefer someone to be more transparent and come as someone who can hopefully help people. It's kind of our way of saying that we don't agree with companies coming to infiltrate our communities where people have like a place in the internet to be honest about their experiences. Do you think there's been an increase in the amount of brands that are reaching out in the past year? Yeah, absolutely. And each brand has a different way that they're trying to be involved. Some brands are doing it the right way. Why would they basically say, "Hey, like this is my name, I'm from this company. I kind of want to come out in here and answer any questions, if there's any quality control issues, customer service, we would love to just respond to that and have it be on our radar so we could better serve the community." So that is something we welcome, but then there's brands that try to just kind of take over and try to spam posts and stuff and use it really as an advertising platform and bury the bad experiences and we don't think that is really fair. It was like all stations need to be manned here, guys, brilliant earth, might be start posting more in our community. Community. You're almost backfired before it even began. Exactly. Our colleague Katie again. And if you look at it from the brand's point of view, you know, they're probably just trying to do all they can to, you know, respond to reviews that they might think are unfair. And brands can do that, you know, if people are posting falsities, you know, they should, a lot of people argue, be allowed to go in and defend themselves. But in this case, it was very interesting to see the reaction to that. What did Brilliant Earth say about this situation? Brilliant Earth said they continue to participate in public conversations across the platform and they managed their own subreddit and that was actually advice they were given by Reddit itself. Are there any brands that have like figured it out? Nike. I think they've got it really right. You know, they go in, they create content specific for Reddit. So they've got this huge roster of athletes, for instance, they can say, hey, we're going to do it in AMA and ask me anything, a chance for Reddit users to quiz these athletes. And they just do that for Reddit. There's also a company like Fidelity that runs its own, a couple of subreddits about investing and about crypto and that kind of just suggests it has authority in that space. Reddit is all about not just what you say, but it's how you say it. You know, a lot of that is so you don't flag any kind of idea of like, hey, you're overly promotional, but they just give the people truly what they want and they're helpful. They're not trying to explicitly sell. So it seems like, you know, for a brand to be successful in Reddit, they need to be real, they need to be upfront about who they are, they need to try to be helpful and be like a participant in the community rather than just promoting everything. Is there any sense that that will affect how the LLMs think about those brands? I think yes, but in very much the long term, I think people will see, especially if they're helpful in a sense of like looking after their customers, that might down the line show up as an LLM if you say, hey, I really want to buy from a company that's not going to screw me over. And then, you know, the LLM might suggest, hey, well, you know, this company has been showing to really take care of its customers, but that can take years and there's no fast track for brands. Reddit does not offer them the chance to buy their way into this. So it's such a long game and I think the thing with Reddit, and I think what we will see is a lot of brands trying to do this, get involved and they'll realize they can't influence LLM results as in tomorrow and they're going to go, okay, well, why don't we just buy an ad with Reddit instead and then therefore it will be seen by the community and we'll try another way of influencing the LLMs. Whether or not brands see their push into Reddit is worth it, might come down to the perseverance of those volunteer moderators like Susan. Do you think there's a chance that Reddit overall might change is more and more brands try to hire people that come up with a Reddit strategy, you know, and start posting more there? Absolutely. I have noticed Reddit changing a lot over the last few years, a lot more advertising, but we're just going to do our best to check which profiles are most likely not to anyone. That's all for today, Monday, August 31st. The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, around every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening, see you tomorrow. [BLANK_AUDIO]