There’s a subreddit for a YouTube channel where the host reads out people’s stories about weddings and the strange things that happen at them. She asks viewers to send stories in. So I sent her mine.
Claudia and I got married four times. The first ceremony got called off when my two best friends objected right in the middle of it: “They don’t even know each other!” Two days later we had a potluck wedding. Then we found out we’d missed the marriage license, so we got married again. Then the official lost the license, and we did it a fourth time. After that one, Claudia turned to me and said, “I’m not marrying you again. This is it.”
Every word of that is true, and I told it at her funeral. On Reddit the comments rolled in saying I’d made it up, that it was all crap, and on and on. It got so heavy that I deleted the post.
That wasn’t a one-off. It doesn’t matter how nice or how useful the post is. Every time I’ve put something on Reddit I’ve gotten hostile responses, a lot of them, and it’s gotten worse over the years. That hostility eats into me, and I don’t need it. These days I go on Reddit maybe once a year, post something, get attacked by everyone and their brother, and delete it real quick.
It can work, if you ask a question nobody can take offense at. My friend Royce Blake, who spent years on the radio, noticed The Price Is Right had quietly dropped its models and asked on Reddit what was going on. Within ten minutes somebody had posted a two-page answer, and he’s had close to 300 notification emails since. A plain question about a TV show is about the only thing Reddit won’t punish you for. Share something true about your own life, though, and see how that goes.
Other people have gotten worse than insults. In April 2025 the moderators of r/changemyview, a Reddit community for people who want their opinions challenged, told their members they’d been part of an experiment nobody agreed to. Researchers from the University of Zurich had been running AI accounts in the subreddit.
One bot posed as a rape survivor. Another claimed to be a trauma counselor. A second AI combed through the posting histories of the people the bots argued with, pulling out their age, gender and location so each reply could be tuned to persuade that one person.
Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, called it “deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level.” Reddit banned the accounts and sent the university formal legal demands. Good. The members of that forum deserved better. Some of them had argued about the most painful things in their lives with software wearing a survivor’s story like a costume, and nothing on the page told them.
Put my wedding story next to the Zurich bots and you’ve got Reddit. You never know who’s talking to you, nobody believes you when you’re telling the truth, the people who do the work don’t get paid, and the company makes its money selling what everybody else wrote. Reddit sucks, and it got a lot worse once it found out the AI business would pay for it.
Who does the work on Reddit?
Anatomy of a Reddit thread. Shares invented, the one real answer at the bottom is not.
A plain question about a TV show is about the only thing Reddit won’t punish you for.
Volunteers do. Every subreddit is run by unpaid moderators who write the rules, remove the spam, ban the trolls and look at the worst material people post so you don’t have to. Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota measured it. Reddit’s moderators put in about 466 hours of work a day, and at a modest $20 an hour that comes to at least $3.4 million a year in free labor, around 2.8 percent of Reddit’s entire 2019 revenue.
In 2023 those volunteers found out what Reddit thought of them. On April 18 the company announced it would start charging for access to its data. The developer of Apollo, the most popular third-party Reddit app, worked out that his bill would come to about $20 million a year. Apollo shut down on June 30, along with Sync, BaconReader and others, and a lot of moderators lost the tools they’d used to keep their communities clean.
More than 7,000 subreddits went dark in protest on June 12. CEO Steve Huffman told NBC News that on Reddit “the analogy is closer to the landed gentry,” people who “get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants.” Then Reddit threatened to replace moderators who kept their communities closed. By July, a company account had taken over protesting subreddits.
I find that disgusting. Those people built the thing Reddit was about to sell, for nothing, for years, and the man at the top compared them to aristocrats squatting on his land.
The people who build Reddit don’t get paid, and the companies that buy it never ask them. – Richard LoweShare on X
Watch: The Reddit Protest Explained (From Reddit’s Perspective), Logically Answered
Who gets paid for what Reddit users write?
Reddit does. In February 2024, on the same day it filed to go public, Reddit announced a deal giving Google access to its content for AI training, reported at $60 million a year. OpenAI signed its own deal a few months later, estimated at about $70 million a year. Every joke, every tutorial and every 2 a.m. confession about a dying parent is training data now, and the people who typed them got karma points.
Business is good. Reddit reported $663 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2026, up 69 percent from a year earlier, with $204 million in net income. In July 2026 the Wall Street Journal reported that Reddit had talked about cutting off Google’s access to its content for AI training as the deal nears its end, and the stock dropped 9 percent in a day. Wall Street watches that contract closely. Did anybody ask the users what they think? Of course not.
Reddit also sued Anthropic in June 2025 over scraping, and in October 2025 it sued Perplexity and three data companies for pulling Reddit posts out of Google search results. Reddit’s argument is that its content is valuable and nobody should take it for free. I agree with that. I’d just like to know why the principle stops at the company’s front door.
Why does Reddit show up at the top of Google now?
Google put it there. After a change to Google’s search algorithm, Reddit’s readership nearly tripled, from 132 million visitors in August 2023 to 346 million in April 2024. By the first quarter of 2026 Reddit counted 74.8 million logged-out daily users against 52 million logged in. Most of the people reading Reddit on a given day aren’t members. They typed a question into a search box and landed there.
AI search leans on it even harder. Profound analyzed 680 million AI citations from August 2024 to June 2025 and found Reddit was the most cited site in Google’s AI Overviews and in Perplexity, and the second most cited in ChatGPT.
I’ve said on air that Reddit isn’t a good source. Nobody on Reddit is vetted. Nobody checks credentials, nothing is peer reviewed, and the answer with the most upvotes is the one the crowd liked. Once in a while it’s right. Would you take medical advice from whoever got the most applause in a bar?
The AI tools learned to write from places like Reddit, and it shows in everything they produce. As I told Riley Kaminer on Leaders and Their Stories, a lot of that writing is mediocre, and plenty of it is terrible.
What happens when marketers learn that AI cites Reddit?
They flood it. Why wouldn’t they? If ChatGPT and Google’s AI read Reddit to decide which product to recommend, the cheapest marketing trick on earth is a fake Reddit post saying your product is wonderful. Brands and agencies are doing exactly that, and they’re using AI to write the fake reviews.
Reddit’s own numbers show the scale. For the first three months of 2026 the company said it removed nearly 2 million fake votes a day, caught about 25,000 new spammy posts and comments a day, and blocked 23 million spam views a day before they reached anybody. Those are the ones it caught.
Real people write for free. Reddit sells their words to AI companies, the AI cites Reddit, and marketers fake Reddit posts to get cited. Then the AI reads the fakes. The person searching for an honest answer ends up with a marketing department’s opinion wearing a stranger’s username, and nobody in that chain has any reason to stop it. It’s a rotten loop.
| Player | What they do | What they get |
|---|---|---|
| Volunteer moderators | Write the rules, remove spam, ban trolls, look at the worst posts | Nothing; the CEO compared them to landed gentry |
| Users | Write the jokes, tutorials and confessions | Karma points |
| Sells access to its content for AI training | Licensing deals with Google and OpenAI | |
| AI companies | Train on Reddit and cite it in AI answers | Reddit ranks among the most cited sites |
| Marketers | Fake Reddit posts, often written with AI | Their products get cited by AI search |
| Searchers | Look for an honest answer | A marketing department’s opinion under a stranger’s username |
My take
Treat Reddit as a rumor mill. The top answer is whatever the crowd liked, the company sells its volunteers’ words to AI companies, and marketers now fake posts so the AI will cite them. It’s a rotten loop. If you’re an author, keep your book link off it, because most communities ban it and fake accounts get caught. Check anything you read there against a vetted source before you act on it.
Should an author promote a book on Reddit?
Not the way most authors try. Most book and writing subreddits ban self-promotion outright or push it into one thread a week, and many communities automatically remove posts from new accounts with little karma. Post a link to your book on your first day and a moderator will delete it, ban you, or both. There’s no appeal worth the name. Who exactly are you supposed to complain to, the volunteer who just banned you? I gave up on it myself. They don’t allow promotion and they’re often very hostile, so I decided it’s just not worth it.
My book The Day Your Website Died has a chapter on Reddit called “The One You Cannot Fake,” and the title is the advice. AI search pays attention to what people say about you there, so it matters. The only presence that survives is a real person answering real questions in a community they belong to, month after month, with no links and no pitch. If you don’t have the patience for that, stay off it. Fake accounts get caught, and the screenshots last a lot longer than the account.
Watch your back in the comments, too. Reddit’s voting rewards the sharpest insult in the thread, and a writer who asks an honest question in the wrong subreddit gets treated like prey. I’ve written about that pile-on culture in the Dogpile series and about how a forum turns into an echo chamber that mistakes agreement for truth.
So does Reddit suck? For the people who make it, yes. They moderate for free, write for free, and watch the company sell their words to the biggest AI firms in the world while bots and marketers pose as their neighbors. (See the Chinese bot farm that posed as Americans in the data center fight) Would you work for a company on those terms?
Read it if you like, but treat every answer there as a rumor until something vetted backs it up. The social media hub has the rest of the series, from LinkedIn to TikTok, and if you want authority nobody can sell out from under you, put it in a book with your name on it. That’s the work I do.
Reddit used to call itself the front page of the internet. (More on why Reddit is putting up a login wall) These days the front page is for sale.
Reddit is one case of a larger pattern. Sins of the Internet covers what the platforms did to us, from addiction designed in on purpose to anger amplified because it pays.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Researchers secretly infiltrated a popular Reddit forum with AI bots, causing outrage, NBC News
- Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth at least $3.4 million a year on Reddit alone, Northwestern University
- Exclusive: Reddit in AI content licensing deal with Google, sources say, Reuters (via AOL)
