How Reddit Plans to Be the Antidote to AI Shopping

It was once a niche, unmoderated corner of the internet reserved for male gamers and web developers to geek out, but today, Reddit is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms across all user demographics.

A quick ask around my Whatsapp groups tells me why it’s appealing to the millennial female. “It’s the source of all knowledge and free of influencers,” says one friend. “I use it because it’s real people, and ChatGPT is soulless and makes me sad,” says another. “I like how old school the platform is — it feels quite separate from adverts, image saturation, influencing,” says a third.

In a world where consumers feel like they’re constantly being sold to, Reddit COO Jen Wong says the platform’s consistent growth over the last 20 years is down to its proposition as a more private, trustworthy corner of the internet, which feels authentic compared to everywhere else. It’s also emerging as an antidote to automated social algorithms and AI. “People like the idea that you’re not influenced by one person or brand like on other social media, but a group of people who give different perspectives around something they deeply care and know about,” Wong tells me. “And as the world turns more to AI and that separation from humans, the value of human intelligence on Reddit is standing out even more.”

This feeling was backed up by the stats in Reddit’s annual results earlier this month. Globally, it’s grown 19% in the last year to over 121 million daily active users, considerably higher than Meta’s 7% daily active user growth. This growth is split across all geographies — in the UK alone, Reddit’s monthly active user base has grown 88% in the last two years, overtaking TikTok. In both the UK and the US, Reddit’s surging user base is now more than 50% women, with Wong adding that it’s pretty evenly split across other demographics like age, too.

“We started with [a] tech dude bend, but it’s now really gender-balanced. In fact, in the UK and Australia, it’s majority women,” she says. “And if you look at the last couple of years, our high-growth areas have been fashion, beauty, TV fandom, and parenting — all universal life things, so there’s no overall demographic skew.”

Since its IPO in March 2024, Reddit has also been a major benefactor of the AI explosion — albeit quite accidentally. The large language models (LLMs) that power AI chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on real-world data, making the vast repository of real human conversations Reddit has amassed since it was founded in 2005 a vital knowledge source for companies like OpenAI, Google and Perplexity, as they race to improve their AI products. On the flip side, consumers are increasingly turning to Reddit’s detailed, human-led subreddits (user-created community pages dedicated to specific topics or interests) as the antidote to those very AI platforms.