A few months ago, I wrote a post entitled “Google AI Overviews is Reddit”. Today, I am here to bring you the news that ChatGPT is no longer Reddit.
Promptwatch, an AI search monitoring and optimization company, reported that ChatGPT citations of Reddit collapsed between August 13 and August 14. Assuming the company’s data are even halfway representative of typical source citation behaviour, this likely indicates some kind of policy change on the part of OpenAI, or otherwise some very strong side effect of a change in how their chatbot’s algorithm weights sources.
I can’t help but notice this change lines up with Reddit’s escalating war on logged out users. In recent weeks, my every attempt to use Reddit on mobile or desktop is quickly met with a splash screen exhorting me to log in or create an account. This used to pop up on mobile occasionally, but could be circumvented by using “Old Reddit”—which the site is now killing for logged out users. Doubtless these actions are part of site’s efforts to combat scraping.
Of course, for two decades, Reddit has been one of the largest corpora of human text available on the internet. The models have already eaten it.
I guess ChatGPT is still Reddit, after all.