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Reddit stock falls for second day as references to its content in ChatGPT responses plummet
(finance.yahoo.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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Huh.
Does anyone else think that ChatGPT is still using the data, they’re just not referencing Reddit directly?
This is how you can tell Reddit’s $200+/share price is insane. Over 10% of its value dropped based on a different unprofitable company’s references to ingested content.
Yikes!!
The entire stock market has become a meme stock pyramid scheme. No price makes sense; it's all glorified gambling making life on this planet worse for most living things.
⚜︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.
Reddit’s value is its ability to use bots to manipulate and distribute information. It’s just like Twitter, meta and all the other social media platforms.
ability to allow bot propaganda to infest the subreddits more easily(especially politics and news)
No, it's value is that users have up voted and down voted good and bad data. This gives the AI training data that has been crowd sourced by humans. Bots manipulating votes would destroy the value of Reddit.
Bots have been controlling votes on Reddit for years. It costs about $50 to get to the front page of Reddit.
Which is also generally very detectable (if you actually care) and is generally used to push (monetized) social media and not the answer to "what is the difference between normal and merino wool?" and so forth.
The vast majority of the "user" interaction and memes is not the product (at play. it IS useful for societal manipulation but there are better platforms for that). It is all those useful questions and answers that people get pissy about folk deleting the answers to.
Because people, generally, weren't searching for
team edward or jacob redditbut insteadthe fuck is a renesme redditorLED versus fluourescent bulbs redditand so forth. And the community labeling of the latter is generally REALLY good.Things DO get messy when the question becomes
best synthetic boxer briefs redditbut... it is incredibly rare for an astro turfing campaign to be strong enough to get a genuinely bad product "on top". You tend to just get an overly expensive branded white label in the top slot which may actually be identical to the "real" best one anyway. But considering you are relying on human opinion regardless, that isn't far off of what you were gonna get without said astroturfing.Interesting analysis thanks
There are absolutely vote manipulation campaigns still happening.
See this from 12 days ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1nldj4m/why_are_we_all_just_accepting_metas_new_spy/?sort=old
12 days ago almost every top-level comment was below -50 and responses were untouched.
Of course there are. That doesn't mean the majority of the site is compromised.
As a user of the website for many years it's entirely obvious that a majority of the website is gamed (besides its niche corners). Reddit's bot prevention mechanisms just fuck VPN users - they are wholly inadequate.
That thread is evidence of a organized bot campaign that they had 12 days to clean up (and didn't). It's naive to believe that the rest of the website isn't similarly (and less obviously) affected by bots - with vote manipulation still standing.
They could sell the cleaned votes to AI companies and keep the dirty data public for the scrapers.
Meta/OpenAI openly pirating everything they can to train their LLMs is a good example of how data hungry these AI/etc. companies are.
Is it plausible that companies request that Reddit narrows down data e.g. by demographic, geographic location, or likelihood of being a real person and request that data for purchase? Sure, but the LLMs seemingly require all data that exists that these companies can get their hands on - I highly doubt with the scale of data being consumed (and data theft being committed) that the big players care too much about Reddit data being tainted. If anything, it might even be desirable to them.
Okay, but it is those niche subs that are the most valuable.
Are you somebody invested financially in Reddit? Genuine question.
Those niche subreddits can also have their moments, too. Maybe it's not bots, but there are plenty of shills that have been caught in various niche subreddits I've frequented over the years (thanks to unpaid moderators).
No, I'm not. I don't care at all if they're successful or go under.
Sure, but again it's not likely to be most. You don't seem to realize how hard it is to get data that is already classified. That stuff is gold to people developing AI. Most of the work in data science is cleaning data and getting it into a usable form.
It's noise, a very large part of it. Reddit is financially motivated to make the data appear as if it is signal. It isn't - they have taken extremely minimal steps to ensure actual human participation.
This doesn't matter to AI companies, but it only warps that technology more and more. AI is a sinking ship with current methodologies. Reddit will die when the AI bubble bursts and those involved with Reddit already cashed out enough to be filthy rich.
At this point we're just speculating. We don't have evidence either way of its mostly good or mostly bad data.
If you can land me a gig engaging with back end data from Reddit in a neutral capacity, it'd likely be pretty easy for a layman like me to confirm that it's largely noise. The AI companies buying data are getting scammed and you are free to remain neutral or plainly disagree with my assessment in the absence of concrete data that is publicly obtainable.
No company is immune to bots and inorganic engagement, least of all Reddit with the strategies employed.
You keep trying to throw out all the data because some is bad. I don't think these companies would be paying that much for all bad data. You seem to really want to justify some bias you have. It's really weird.
Reddit is presumably the only party with the ability to determine which data/interaction is truly legitimate or isn't.
I have a mostly neutral opinion on AI/LLMs, but I have a negative assessment of the companies driving it unsustainably. They are able to pay big money because AI is where money is flowing. When these actors crash the economy with their hubris, please write back to me - maybe I won't seem so weird at that point.
havnt they already destroyed the value of reddit, the bots already have massive hordes of downvoting/voting going on.
Ok, so how does a shareholder benefit from that? My company that pays people to stomp on kittens at my kitten stomping factory has value in that in gives people jobs and controls the feral cat population, but it creates no profit for the shareholders.
Yeah reddit's a weird one. Their financials, aside from this year, are also horrendous. Not sure what value they really bring.
Reddit shareholders also own a lot of shares in much more lucrative industries.
I didn't ask about their other shares. I asked how Reddit's soft power is able to actually benefit shareholders. I understand how it benefits Spez and those who make the actual decisions at reddit, but if I own 400 shares of Reddit, how do i actually benefit since Reddit will never pay a dividend since it will never actually be profitable
The people in power don’t care about people with a few shares. You can sell all your shares right now and nobody would notice.
Reddit’s power benefits whomever wants to push an agenda and a narrative while minimizing any info that could counter that.
How is that any different than what i initially said?
Companies pay for API access so profits go up and stock value go up.
I assume the reddit stock doesn't pay dividends based on profits. But if you bought for 10 dollars and now it is 500 dollars? You can sell some of that stuck to people hoping it will go up to 1000 dollars for a solid profit. And so forth.
And if it DOES pay dividends (some kinds of stocks do) then a percentage of those profits are directly sent to the share holders based on how many shares they have.
I understand how stocks work. Reddit stock is just a legitimizes greater fool scam as no one will ever get a dividend or see any return in their investment short of managing to sell the stock for more than they bought it. Reddit is absolutely worthless in an strictly economic sense. It's value is soley in societial and political ways
So... it is a stock that doesn't pay dividends? Like... that is what stocks are.
Which will only actually ever benefit anyone that owns massive amounts of the stock. Reddit has few tangible assets other than their data, which is of questionable value at best. It's basically like owning stock in a piblic library
Homie? I assume you are just looking to hear "reddit bad" and... it is.
But if you are actually attempting to discuss things in good faith? You are just describing stocks and you should REALLY educate yourself on the subject if you ever intend to invest beyond retirement and mutual funds... which most people shouldn't in the first place but that is an even bigger tangent.
I am looking at it froma purely financial standpoint. The inky thing Reddit really produces is semi-anonymous data that is tied to an email address. The quality of that data is iffy at best, while they have massive expenses just to keep the site operating. They can charge for their API calls, but they will never be able to use that to generate actual profit since no one will ever pay for it at that price point.
Something like Reddit or twitter are useful if they are owned by powerful individuals or corporations that wish to influence the public. It is worthless as a strictly financial vehicle because it produces no profit and has assets that are not not equal to the cost of maintain them. You would only buy stock in reddit in the hopes that some billionaire thinks they can do a better job running it than Elon Musk did with twitter. Otherwise reddit stock is just a volatile place to park your cash in the hope that you can sell it for more later.
Which takes me back to my original comment about the kitten stomping factory. It gives value to a select group of people with a specific aim, but it is worthless as an investment vehicle because it owns little, produces nothing, and has massive liabilities. If you want to exert power and influence, it's useful. If you only care about making money, it's useless. People who buy and sell stock are mostly only interested in making money.
Then let's do that.
Reddit has three official and one implied revenue streams.
Of the official, we have:
Ad sales. This is where most "user data" actually comes into play and is the idea of building a profile of each user that can be used to put them into categories for targeted ads. That might be a simple as "likes video games, hates women, curious about learning to pee while sitting down". Or it might be "doesn't realize that guy at the bar took off the condom and is now pregnant". This is demonstrably profitable and doesn't seem to be effected.
The next is people buying reddit premium because they are idiots.
The last official oneis the actual topic of this thread. Reddit sells API access to, among others, companies training LLMs. ChatGPT has, allegedly, stopped using them. Thus, one of their major sources of revenue dried up and their stock dropped as a result.
As for the rest:
Ah, so you DO know what the definition of a stock is. You just refuse to accept it because the word "reddit" is involved.
The vast majority of stocks are horrible to even consider purchasing as an individual. A general rule of thumb is the only ones you should even consider buying are those with dividends where you just buy a few shares and every couple years check your investment account and transfer the excess to your savings.
The rest you rely entirely on mutual funds (and similar). Where the idea is that an investment group has a large pool of money and they try to stay ahead of minor fluctuations and often outright bet against themselves. So you might have some funds earmarked at assuming reddit will go up and other funds that take the Oracle announcement as a hint that OpenAI spending on Reddit might decrease and sell the stocks ahead of time to buy shares in coca cola instead or whatever.
But the thing to understand is that that is happening to basically every single stock. Because the fundamental idea of the stock market is about leaving others holding the bag.
The ads/manipulation does a thing that helps you attain profit or power. You want to manipulate what people see and pay for... so you pay reddit to allow you to mass deploy bots bypassing moderator levers. They have the community, you have the objective, you pay for the help of doing this and they probably have their own bot farms included.
They can even internally flag these entries as bots and use their AI partnerships to analyze what works on users and what doesn't to trigger a specific response, and to avoid using techniques that get called out as bots.
They have their public 'sponsored' content, but I promise for big spenders they have a program that has no sponsorship callout. They probably brand it with nice fancy marketing terminology that makes it sound like you're an angel doing god's work by driving conversions or some stupid shit.
I understand that Reddit has value to an individual or small board that can control what is posted to reddit. What i am saying is that Reddit's value is entirely in soft power and has no actual path to profitablity. If i am Condé Nast then i can benefit from owning reddit. But Reddit will never pay a dividend, so buying stock in the company is worthless unless you are convinced that some idiot will pay more for it down the road.
You don't think reddit can make money from advertising?
It hasn't been able to thus far, same as every other "free" social media site other than Facebook. The problem is the sheer scale of the data that these sites have to main makes their overhead costs insane. To make profit from those ad spaces would require those ads to be too expensive to justify to the companies. It would be like trying to operate the New Orleans Superdome purely on ad space. The rate would be way too high to for companies advertising to ever get a return on their investment. Reddit can run ads to subsidize their costs, but it will never be viable as a primary revenue stream for them.
its useful as a propaganda tool, much like Xitter.
I agree. But propaganda tools typically aren't publicly traded because they are a venture that requires a lot of expenses but being it little cash value, which is the entire point of the stock market.
Yes, but Oracle's stock skyrocketed based on the unprofitable OpenAI promising to buy >100B worth of AI data center space from Oracle. Nvidia stock also surged on the news, since Oracle builds those data centers with Nvidia chips
Obviously OpenAI doesn't have the money to pay Oracle themselves, so Nvidia has helpfully given them the money
So now we have an incredibly large cyclic corporate dependency of money from Nvidia -> OpenAI -> Oracle, then back to Nvidia. Definitely not a financial disaster waiting to happen
They haven't even spent the fucking money yet. It's just announcements of intentions, with a fraction of that $100B in outlays. Nobody seems to want to say who gets to be the one holding the $100B at the end of it, either.
Presumably they'll all just do a stock swap and tell their vendors "We're good for it, check's in the mail"?
Well, that and the P/E is 180. Typical target P/E on a stock is 15-20, depending on your anticipation of its growth. But we're expected to believe Reddit's earnings will be 9x their current income in... some nebulous amount of time?
Like, its silly to get excited about a company this hyperinflated seeing a tiny slide off its new peak. But also, you can't help be bearish on a firm this flimsy.
While I don't agree with the reddit valuation to begin with...
that is actually how the stock market "should" work? Reddit is a company that, at its core, produces data to sell to other companies. If other companies choose to (say they are not going to) use that data, then the value of reddit drops. That is literally supply and demand.
If Stanley's Sprockets' sprockets are a vital part of iphones then Stanley's Sprockets is going to be a very valuable company. If Apple changes to the other dude's product, Stanley's Sprockets has now lost a lot of value.
Reddit produces nothing. They dupe their users into doing that. Which seem to largely be bots now.