https://www.reddit.com/answers
Reddit has released a new feature called Reddit Answers, something that takes us back to the early 2010s when Q&A sites were the hype of the day. It works by using generative AI to generate answers from Reddit users’ comments and posts. Reddit has a bit of a reputation for having a not so great search function, so perhaps developers at Reddit feel AI will be able to source info from user contributions in a way that delivers answers quickly and specifically.
A couple of quick points about this release. For a while, Quora has been the go-to Q&A site. It hovers in the background with hundreds of millions of monthly active users; large enough to make a lot of money through advertising but not quite big enough to stand alongside giants such as Meta, Google etc. But Quora is growing (now at 400 million MAU compared to 300 MAU in 2018), so perhaps Reddit wanted to get in on the action beyond its r/answers subreddit.Â
Also, more people are asking questions directly to ChatGPT, Google Gemini, DeepSeek etc. Reddit likely doesn’t want to lose out market share from this segment shifting away from traditional search engines. But in order to do this, it actually has to work. There’s a frequent “We encountered an error processing the request, Try Again” message that pops up when asking a Q.
So, what do people think about it?
So, there are some benefits to it. AI can summarise the key points in a long Reddit discussion thread that would otherwise take a while to comb through. But while Reddit sources its answers back to the person (or bot) making the post, AI-generated text is flat and dull. You lose a bit of the Reddit experience. Many people go to Reddit for the snarky, sarcastic and humorous contributions of reddit0rs. AI doesn’t quite have that human reddit0r feel.
And that’s the key issue. Reddit Answers misses the key point of Reddit. When it started out as a link aggregator, it was pretty novel (despite Digg being launched earlier). But what really catapulted to the next level was the thriving community discussions. That’s still the USP of Reddit. AI-generated summaries of these authentic discussions arguably takes away from the very aspect that made Reddit so special.
