Oct 30 (Reuters) - Reddit shares tumbled 29% on Friday, marking their biggest single-day drop and hitting their lowest level in over a year, after the company warned that Google’s AI-powered search was hurting referral traffic and could shrink its user base.

The online discussion platform still appears in Google search results but is attracting fewer clicks, as users increasingly rely on the tech giant’s AI tools for direct answers.

"When more than a million search referrals a week disappear because Google’s AI answers the question itself, investors are no longer looking just at the next three or four months, but at how much of Reddit’s audience it will really own in the years ahead," said Vitor Madeira, senior market specialist at Capital.com.

Reddit warned that its daily active unique visitors could fall by a low double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter if referral traffic kept declining.

If current losses hold, Reddit is set to lose more than $7 billion in market value and Pinterest about $900 million. The two stocks have fallen about 44% and 23%, respectively, this year through their last close.

Reddit has a 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio of 19.03, compared with Snap’s 7.53 and Pinterest’s 8.48, according to LSEG data.

Separately, Reddit on Friday said it has extended its cloud services agreement with Google through 2029, committing to spend $580 million over three years.

At least 11 brokerages cut their price targets on Reddit, and at least 13 did so on Pinterest.

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[–] 119 points 1 week ago (22 children)

Have they tried making the UI shittier?

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  • [–] 53 points 1 week ago (12 children)

    old.reddit, a clear example of don't fix what ain't broken

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  • [–] 28 points 1 week ago (3 children)
  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Do people on lemmy have memory loss? This isnt the first time someone claimed something old is actually new

    People have been saying that the reddit app is unusable when the API pricing was announced

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    All I get is a page telling me to login

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Yeah old Reddit was locked up a few months ago. They don't want people scraping and most new users use the 'new' interface.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    They're appealing to a different generation users. New reddit users think old reddit is ancient outdated design. They like the new design because it's oriented to the internet generation that uses mobile UIs.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 week ago

    That might actually be an active strategy.
    Making the UI worse so people have to click around more. Makes opportunity for more advertising, and makes it look like people are engaging more.
    Never really thought about it that way.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    You say that…

    I still use the app for 1 specific thing and let me tell you the iOS app (presumably their largest audience) is GARBAGE. And it gets worse every single release.

    The latest release has a dead zone (!) in the list view. You’ll click a row/item and nothing happens. It only occurs after using the app for a bit and only in certain vertical place (about 20% down from the top). You have to scroll the list to be to click that item. Hilarious.

    Of course all of this is on top the numerous other bugs.

    Chrstian - ONE FUCKING GUY - made a superior app by himself. What did PewDiePie say, “it’s evolving, only backwards.”

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

    I think it took them 4 years to get their video player working too. A video player.

    Their video player still doesn't work

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Their video player working would be news to me in 2026. I still have to download most videos in order to watch them.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Ugh, on the theme of media, their image-hosting is so incredibly user-hostile.

    I used image search to find something the other day, and the one I wanted was hosted on Reddit. But, it was impossible to see the whole image because Reddit insisted that the only way to see the image was with the whole forum around it, and the image resized to fit that view, with the top and bottom of the image cropped out. There was no way to actually see the full image with the top and bottom visible on Reddit. I had to actually download the image to see that part.

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