For the folks who want to know the cause of the investigation without needing to click through to the article:
Why is Reddit being Investigated?
Reddit owns and operates the eponymous social news aggregation, forum, and social media platform. Reddit receives a significant portion of its user traffic from individuals seeking answers to questions using Google Search. During the relevant period, Reddit assured investors that Google’s use of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) in Google’s search results did not have a material impact on Reddit’s user growth.
In truth, Google’s use of AI dented Reddit’s user growth by eliminating the need for individuals to visit and click through to Reddit to get answers to their questions. Rather, the answers appeared through Google’s AI search results.
Reddit made it unmistakably clear that they don’t want traffic from people using their API and that they don’t want google or anyone else to scrape “their” content, which I’m pretty sure will have significant impact on SEO. They also have made sure to please potential shareholders by banning a ton of users and communities before their IPO.
As a result, the quality and quantity of discussion on the platform has lowered, some people even tried to mass delete their posts and comments which makes some threads to appear like ghost towns, which has also revealed the insane amount of inorganic communication (bots and the like).
So how exactly did google kill their userbase?
ELI5 version.
…
Reddit Investors:
Google is deploying its AI summary tool as part of its main search engine now.
Prior to this, many people used Reddit to find detailed information about, answer questions pertaining to, or otherwise discuss, more niche topics.
Google has scraped Reddit and has basically all of its information, as well as the… basically the entire rest of the internet.
Will Google’s deployment of AI powered summaries as its default search tool impact the projected future usage and growth of Reddit?
Reddit CEO/Board of Directors:
No.
…
Current lawsuit is over that ‘No’ being a lie, as well as whether or not it was an intentional lie, as in, they knew it would, and lied, and said it would not.
More technically, the relevant term is ‘misrepresentation of a material fact’, which is essentially the legal term for ‘lying to investors’, though the exact standards of this can be different in arcane legal ways from other kinds of legal ‘lying’ such as defamation, slander, providing false info to a police officer, perjury, etc.
Whenever I do searches now, through ecosia, any Reddit results come up with “we’d like to show you a preview of this content but can’t”.
Im not entirely sure why it happens (it’s not always on a pc with a VPN, so that’s not it), though I assume it’s to do with the API crackdown. It has been highly effective at keeping me the hell off Reddit for literally anything for the past several months.
This is not about what Google did but rather how reddit presented what Google did in its financial statements.
IE misleading investors regarding the impact Google AI Seach will have on traffic
Misleading, this is just some ambulance chasing law firm throwing stuff at the wall. It’s unlikely that anything will come of this.
