Reddit is the latest company to incorporate an AI chatbot into its platform, promising its users “a new way to get information”.
Reddit Answers was promised four months ago by CEO Steve Huffman during the company’s second ever earnings call since it became a publicly traded venture.
But the IPO has opened the company up to criticism that it is putting dollars before users – especially when a deal with Google to share data to train AI models was on the table. This new announcement though is an olive branch to Redditors as this AI is being deployed to make their experience better.
What Is Reddit Answers?
Reddit Answers is an AI-powered tool or “conversational interface” where Redditors can get answers and advice as well as access to summaries of the millions of threads on the platform relevant to whatever topic they are looking into.
Reddit explains in a post that when users ask a question, they’ll get “…curated summaries of relevant conversations and details…including links to related communities and posts.” They can then either read what they want inline or click to access the full, original conversations.
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The team adds that the AI-chatbot also has the ability to suggest questions so that they can delve deeper into their topic, though they can opt to just use their own queries.
Who Will Have Access to Reddit Answers and When?
Support will initially be in English and Reddit says that the tool will first be available to a “limited number of users” in the US.
According to the Business of Apps, Reddit had 850 million monthly active users in 2023, with the US leading the ranking. Outside of the US, Redditors are going to have to wait to give the tool a go. Reddit gave a vague nod to its intention to roll out Reddit Answers to other countries and in other languages but would only say that this will come “in the future”.
Redditors can, however, register their interest via a webpage set up by Reddit by hitting the “Keep me updated” button.
What Else Can We Expect From Reddit?
In October, Reddit finally returned a profit after 19 years of losses. “Q3 was a landmark quarter for Reddit,” said co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman in the quarterly report to shareholders. “We averaged over 97 million daily active uniques, an increase of 47% from last year, and for the first time, we exceeded 100 million a few times during the quarter, which has been a longstanding milestone for us.”
Huffman said that AI had paid a huge role in the company’s turnaround, including translation tools to help Redditors get access to more content in their own languages. Huffman said: “This quarter, machine translation drove four times more users than last quarter, and based on the success we’ve seen so far, we plan to expand machine translation to over 30 countries through 2025.”
So what does this mean for the future? Huffman didn’t give specifics but did say “new product developments” were in the pipeline, and Reddit Answers is one of the first.
More AI-powered tools could be coming for 2025 as well as a boost to the ads side of the business. But first up – we shall all be waiting to find out if Q4 was also profitable for the business or if it has slipped back into loss.
