Social media micro-blogging platform Reddit has launched ‘Reddit Answers‘ to give the “answers, perspectives, and recommendations from all of Reddit.” Reddit Answers is the new entrant in the Generative AI sector, competing with rivals like ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, Grok and Gemini. However, similar to X’s Grok, Reddit is largely trained on its own data.
Reddit Answers is in beta version since its launch in December 2024 for selected users and is currently available in nine countries, including India. Currently, it supports only English and 20 questions and 100 questions per day for logged-in and premium users, respectively.
According to a MoneyControl report, Reddit filed its IPO prospectus to SEBI on February 22, 2024. Later that year, the company established its offices in India under India’s legal framework, which mandates that social media companies have physical offices in India. Earlier last year, Reddit went public in the US. The platform has been free for all since its debut in 2005. However, Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, indicated in Reddit’s AMA session that some of the content may go behind the paywall from this year.
Social Media as a Search Engine
The traditional search engine landscape is changing. In 2022, The New York Times reported: “For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine.” In the same year, Google’s Vice President, Prabhakar Raghavan, commented on the growing shift trend from traditional search engines. “Almost 40% of young people, when looking for a place for lunch, don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram,” he said at a Fortune’s tech conference.
Following this trend, Google made a deal with Reddit to give it exclusive access to its User Generated Content (UGC). As part of their deal, the micro-blogging platform updated its Robots Exclusion Protocol, a technology used to grind website content, to prevent other Generative AI companies from scraping their data. This resulted in Google preferring the results from Reddit to the traditional SEO-optimised web pages.
Why It Matters:
Google had a monopoly in the search engine space for a long time. Now, the monopoly is slowly breaking in many ways. On the one hand, the tech giant is facing multiple anti-trust lawsuits across the globe including in India, the US, EU, UK, Australia, Brazil etc. On the other hand, the latest AI-powered tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity AI have already changed how people generally interact with the internet and search engines.
Reddit continues to have a deal with Google. But, how long? Especially when the internet behaviours are slowly changing (read adopting) to AI-based browsers and search engines, including Google with its Gemini AI tool.
The community-driven platform Reddit is known for its user-generated content that is more personal, direct, and experiential compared to many SEO-optimised blog posts and their redundant, overwhelming content. Reddit is one more social media platform that has come up with its own AI app. Recently, X also launched its own AI app, Grok, which is infamously known for its abusive language and is trained on X’s user data. According to the media reports, Meta is also planning its standalone AI app to reach non-Meta users beyond Instagram and WhatsApp.
Amidst all this, the question of who owns your data on their platform remains unsolved.
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