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  • The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.

    It’s with some irony, then, that Reddit has become a reservoir of humanity. The platform has itself been called a cesspool, rife with hateful rhetoric and falsehoods. But it is also known for quirky discussions and impassioned debates on any topic among its users. Does charging your brother rent, telling your mom she’s an unwanted guest, or giving your wife a performance review make you an asshole? (Redditors voted no, yes, and “everyone sucks,” respectively.) The site is where fans hash out the best rap album ever and plumbers weigh in on how to unclog a drain. As Google has begun to offer more and more vacuous SEO sites and ads in response to queries, many people have started adding reddit to their searches to find thoughtful, human-written answers: find mosquito in bedroom reddit; fix musty sponge reddit.

    But now even Reddit is becoming more artificial. The platform has quietly started beta-testing Reddit Answers, what it calls an “AI-powered conversational interface.” In function and design, the feature—which is so far available only for some users in the U.S.—is basically an AI chatbot. On a new search screen accessible from the homepage, Reddit Answers takes anyone’s queries, trawls the site for relevant discussions and debates, and composes them into a response. In other words, a site that sells itself as a home for “authentic human connection” is now giving humans the option to interact with an algorithm instead.

    The company announced the feature last month as an improved “search experience” that pulls “information … from real conversations and communities across all of Reddit.” Reddit Answers includes links to those conversations, which users are free to click, read, and comment on. Even so, using Reddit Answers is a demoralizing experience. It’s streamlined, yes: The AI responds to questions in bulleted lists, with bold headings followed by summaries of and brief quotes from actual Reddit discussions. But these answers lose the messy, endearing excess of any good Reddit thread. They appear like takeaways instead of teasers, final answers instead of entry points for further discovery; you are unlikely to fall down a rabbit hole of posts from here. Nor are you encouraged to unfurl a thread of people debating, reviewing, and building upon legitimately useful advice. Instead of a Redditor, you feel like you’re just here to peck meat off of some bones.

    Consider, for example, requesting tips for traveling with a baby on an airplane. Reddit Answers generates a list of ideas—perhaps “Pack Essentials” or “Board Early”—decontextualized from the parents who gathered this wisdom, the fun horrifying and hilarious anecdotes in their original posts, and the heartwarming support and tips in additional responses. Perhaps the greatest value of a good Reddit thread is the informed disagreement on best purchases and practices—what really were the best earbuds of 2024, and for what reasons. The chatbot’s bulleted summaries steamroll that back-and-forth. The AI answer isn’t even clearly more efficient or useful than reading answers yourself. Aside from the specificity, caveats, and elaboration unique to human conversations, many Redditors already format their responses in digestible lists. (In one thread asking for tips for flying with a baby, the top comment is a list in which every other bullet reads “snacks.”)

    For less pragmatic matters, it’s hard to imagine any advantage to using Reddit’s AI. Asking the chatbot for music recommendations will return a boring, unwieldy list. The Reddit thread “What’s a dead giveaway someone grew up as an only child?” has some fantastic responses—doesn’t immediately know which half of a sliced cake is bigger, can’t roughhouse, leaves rooms without announcing where they are going—while the AI answers are bland: “Difficulty Sharing,” “Difficulty in Relationships.” Why would I ask an AI about the odds that the New York Mets re-sign Pete Alonso, what makes focaccia in Liguria special, or the annoying thing about transplants to New York City? Reddit, for its part, seems to understand the limitations: When I reached out to ask about this product, a spokesperson told me over email that in part, “Answers simply summarizes redditors’ existing posts and conversations without presenting an opinion or perspective of its own” and directs users to relevant discussions.

    The site exists as it always has outside of Reddit Answers, but the embrace of generative AI feels foreboding. This is a trend across much of the digital and now even physical worlds, as tech companies stuff the technology into apps, smartphones, and glasses. AI can legitimately make life easier—helping more quickly summarize complex topics, write computer code, or edit photos, for instance. But many applications of AI remain limited and frequently superfluous. Google, instead of organizing humanmade information, is blending the web through frequently flawed “AI Overviews.” Apple is touting an Apple Intelligence service that has sent fake-news alerts (a problem that the company solved by temporarily turning off this part of the feature altogether) and that strip mines texts into “lifeless summaries,” as my colleague Lila Shroff noted. Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno, an AI music start-up, recently said that making music is “not really enjoyable”—his product can do that work instead. Algorithms, instead of helping bring you to humans, are being pitched as the web’s start, middle, and end point.

    All of these generative-AI applications, of course, are only as good as the content they draw from. (Reddit has long been prized as a trove of high-quality AI-training data.) Without human answers, there is no Reddit Answers—and so, should the feature really take off and Redditors stop engaging with one another, the chatbot will be drained of biological intelligence, and soul as well. Such is it with any AI tool seeking to synthesize, summarize, and boil portions of the web to their essence: eventually, the pot will burn dry.

  • Reddit as "reservoir of humanity"... and the example is r/AITA, the most notoriously fake subreddit out there?? 🤣🤣

    How disconnected from reality does one have to be to write something like that.

    Reddit Answers takes anyone’s queries, trawls the site for relevant discussions and debates, and composes them into a response

    Then people feel entitled to insult me for having blanked most of my comments on Reddit. "Why did you do this, [expletive]?"... Yeah, why indeed. 😒

  • I WISH reddit would end. I used to love it for the batshit insane personal stuff people wouldn't share anywhere else. "I haven't pooped in a month, AMA", that kind of dumb voyeuristic crap.

    It turns out that's what everyone else loved too, and it's profitable to have AIs write it so you can read it on YouTube for ad revenue. And y'all, it's so stupid.

    The most bizarrely specific scenarios pop up again and again, and people eat it up every time. "AITA for not giving my evil infertile sister my baby?" "My parents promised my brother and evil SIL my house without consulting me, AITA?" "My evil MIL was female aka evil, AITA?"

    And then you have subreddits like BestOfRedditor updates, which you'd expect to curate these posts so the slop doesn't come through, but in reality it's a handful of power users obsessively following and reposting any post with "update" in the title or even just edits with the barest amount of self reflection. Posts have wild plotholes, like a 30yo being divorced for 15 years, and it's considered "best of" as long as there's an evil woman/autistic person/trans person, I guess.

    But no, this AI shit means it will never end, because it gets numbers, and numbers matter more than anything else.

  • I don't know if Reddit will end, however, it has become increasingly unusable. I just want tech news and light discussion of them, but I get so much more 'extras' I never signed up for.

    • I think we're seeing the death of scale in social media. Ten years ago, the most heavily trafficked subreddits were where you wanted to be. Now, I'm only in niche communities that have yet to be replicated in the Fediverse. Unless you unsubscribe from anything remotely popular, Reddit has been a firehose of bullshit for several years.

      • Even in some niche things, it seems like people have lost their minds. I like AI and predicting future science and world developments, but honestly, there is not one subreddit where people can just calmly discuss stuff and share news about it all without being just... strange. I want to read commentary like this https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace not "You stupid moron xyz I am right, so much superior is my opinion" or "bow your heads to great technosingularity that will fix my shitty life", "the DOOM is coming". I want a platform where there is something worthwhile to read.

        I don’t expect everyone to write essays under the news, but nobody is even trying to compose something interesting— some kind of thoughts they have— that maybe they want to share with us. It’s mostly just karma popularity contest everywhere, and that’s tiresome on the eyes.

  • Just think ahead to when they try to humanize AI by adding back in "personalities" - basically replacing the human answers offered freely (at no monetary cost), and freely moderated by humans, with for-cost versions that are 1/1000th as good as the real thing.

    You will own nothing - not even your personal opinions - and like it.

    • There's a reason I already live in a van with 1200W of solar on the roof. I want no part of this.

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