Reddit was built in the spirit of the early Internet. Anyone could read it without an account, sign up without an email address, and post without a real name. Chris Slowe, Reddit’s first employee, served as CTO for nine years. He called it “the dream of the ’90s open Web.”

That openness is now under pressure from scrapers, spam, and AI agents. Reddit was the first of 11 stops over three days on the study tour at INMA’s Media Tech & AI Week in San Francisco. There, Slowe, now senior technical fellow, and Leslie Liu, senior director and deputy general counsel, told the tour’s 31 participants how Reddit is trying to stay open to people while controlling how machines use what those people create.

“We want to keep Reddit as the most human place on the Internet,” Slowe said.

Communities set the culture

Reddit has about 130 million daily users and roughly 100,000 active communities. Volunteer moderators set each community’s rules, and that is where its culture comes from.

One of the most common rules is some version of “Don’t be a jerk.” Slowe said the company could never enforce that centrally: “If you try to, you end up making effectively the tax code of rules.”

Pseudonymity is part of the model. Attaching real names hasn’t stopped people from behaving badly online, Slowe said, and posting without a name removes the incentive to pose. But it only works if a platform can ban the person behind an account, not just the account.

Reddit relies on a “basket of signals” built over 20 years of fighting spam. These are mostly metadata rather than content.

Open, but not for the taking

Being open also means being open to businesses that build on Reddit’s data. Reddit pays to serve that traffic while the value goes elsewhere. “We want to be open, but we also don’t want to be taken advantage of,” Slowe said.

Reddit’s response has two parts. Known AI companies get a paid route through licensing deals; Reddit has them with OpenAI and Google.

Under those deals, partners must honour user deletions and edits, Liu said, and may not use the data to track or profile users. Reddit sends delete events through its data feed and keeps an audit trail of what partners remove, Slowe said. Unknown scrapers face tighter technical controls. Reddit has also taken legal action against several scrapers that circumvent its protections or hide their identity, Liu said.

The two parts depend on each other. “If you don’t provide legitimate ways to get content, you get piracy,” Slowe said.

Self-identified crawlers such as Googlebot can be managed. The harder cases are fly-by-night operations running through residential proxies and hacked devices. Reddit blocks about 22 million attempts to get through its front door each day and discounts about 2 million inauthentic votes, Slowe said.

No single defence works, he said, so Reddit layers them like slices of Swiss cheese: “Every layer is going to have a bunch of holes in it.” The goal is to make sure the holes don’t line up. A determined adversary will still get through; the aim is to make that expensive.

Slowe sees a role for content delivery networks such as Cloudflare, which can spot patterns across many sites. That helps publishers too small to build their own defences.

Even so, he expects publishers will need their own protections on top: “Ultimately, it’s a cat-and-mouse game.”

Not anti-bot, not anti-AI

Reddit isn’t trying to remove all bots. Moderation helpers, translation tools, and novelty accounts are part of the site’s charm. One novelty account converts between metric and imperial units. The rule now is that users should know what they’re interacting with.

Reddit labels bots and calls them “apps,” because everyone hates the word “bot,” Slowe said.

The same principle applies to AI content. By the end of the year, users will be able to disclose AI use when creating posts or comments, Liu said. Reddit will also label content it detects through state of the art detection methods, including C2PA provenance metadata. Some labelling is required by law. Individual communities can set stricter rules.

The hardest line is between people using AI to help them write and actual spam. Reddit doesn’t have a good answer yet, Slowe said. For now, the test is whether a human was in the loop and is behaving well. Mistakes are inevitable, so Reddit built ways for users wrongly flagged as bots to get out.

Licensing isn’t the business

For all the attention it gets, licensing is a small part of Reddit’s business. Data licensing revenue is significant, Liu said, but nowhere near what Reddit earns from advertising. Reddit signed its first deals in 2024, and Liu said they come up for renewal within the next year.

“Two years is several generations in AI,” she said.

Reddit is also building AI answers into its own search, citing the communities they draw from. People often don’t want a single answer from a chatbot, Liu said. “You want the discussion.”

What news publishers can take from it

Asked how news companies should use Reddit, both speakers said posting links doesn’t work because communities reject anything that looks like a shill. What works is joining conversations already under way, for example a reporter answering questions in a thread about their story.

The next challenge is already arriving: AI agents acting for individual people, which fit neither the human nor the bot rulebook. There is no good way yet to give an agent limited, temporary permission, Slowe said. He compared it to handing over “the keys to my car for the next hour.”

For the past three years, he said, he hasn’t tried to look more than about six months ahead.

The study tour continues Tuesday at Salesforce, Everlaw, OpenAI, and The San Francisco Standard.

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