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Reddit stock collapses 23% as AI eats away at user growth
(finance.yahoo.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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I call bullshit. AI didn't eat their user growth.
They sold out the users, making the experience objectively worse. They turned the screws until many of the positive, helpful users left. They became hyper-toxic; now, no one wants to be there, even for the niche communities. They're moderating like they're at war with any half-decent human being, and now they've locked down the free/easy access, ruining the one remaining marketing trick they had (google search results)
Honestly I'm done with the moderation more than anything, I got so fed up with the blatant manipulation on one of the subs I've frequented for over a decade I wrote a script to see what was going on with all the silent removals and so much was just vanishing. Capture all the comments every minute and diff them, you'll see what I mean.
Realised the reddit most of us knew was as good as dead then to be honest. Powermods are a cancer and the only chemo is to leave the place altogether.
I read the writing on the wall when they started clawing back free mobile access.
The first time a 'free' platform makes a desperate move, it's time to relocate. I wiped all my posts and left my accounts open. Then, I went back and wiped them again every time they magically reappeared.
I only left my posts in the sub that helped people understand Fediverse and Lemmy.
I didn't know they put posts back. I went in and wiped all my stuff around then too but I didn't look back.
I spent time over several months hand deleting my post one by one, and they don't show up for me.
But one time after deleting them, someone replied to one of those deleted posts, so I think they're visible to others, but not to me anymore.
I left all my accounts to this day because I don't trust them
You want to go more into that? Sounds super interesting, and not all of us have the tech knowledge to do that
So the idea is that you capture everything in the subreddit (posts, comments, votes if they're not delayed to the point of uselessness) and save it to a database. The API rate limit is low these days but not so low you can't do this for a moderately sized sub in the space of a minute or so. It's easy enough to write a script that does this capturing, and after every capture you compare it with the previous one. The difference or 'diff' between the two captures is the content which was added and removed between the captures. Take the removed content, subtract those deleted by the user, subtract those openly removed by the mods, and you get the silently removed content minus API errors, reddit's own anti-spam and so on. This is often quite revealing!
Obviously this is not a perfect method, reddit itself really hates people trying to impose transparency on its platform. It has long falsely reported votes, totals, and all sorts of information while particularly shower-dodging mods will deploy their own bots on top of reddit's own which can well beat your bot to the punch. This adds error to the process, but you can definitely see trends this way in my opinion.
They gave their user~~base~~ growth to AI and AI ate it
Edit: I thought it over and user growth actually makes sense here
I love eating userbases. Just like how I eat a couple small rocks every day.