Reddit Finds Position Threatened

For 20 years, Reddit (NYSE:RDDT) has pitched itself as “the front page of the internet.” AI threatens to change that.As social media has changed over the past two decades with the shift to mobile and the more recent focus on short-form video, peers like MySpace, Digg and Flickr have faded into oblivion. Reddit, meanwhile, has refused to die, chugging along and gaining an audience of over 108 million daily users who congregate in more than 100,000 subreddit communities. There, Reddit users keep it old school and leave simple text comments to one another about their favorite hobbies, pastimes and interests.Those user-generated text comments are a treasure trove that, in the age of artificial intelligence, Reddit is fighting to defend.The emergence of AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Gemini threaten to inhale vast swaths of data from services like Reddit. As more people turn to chatbots for information they previously went to websites for, Reddit faces a gargantuan challenge gaining new users, particularly if Google’s search floodgates dry up.CEO Steve Huffman explained Reddit’s situation to analysts in May, saying that challenges like the one AI poses can also create opportunities.RDDT shares popped $8.58, or 6%, to $151.59.