• Reddit announced it will be going logged-in only (with some caveats).
• This comes after Reddit's search traffic has fallen, as people use AI more and more.
• But in 2024, Reddit had a search traffic bonanza after cutting a deal with Google.

Reddit announced on Thursday that it will soon start being a (mostly) logged-in-only experience, citing declining search traffic as one of the reasons. Redditors, who are famously level-headed and open to change, reacted about how you would expect.

In an earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman said that Google's AI Overviews "are not traffic drivers"," and that "Google has really shifted in their relationship with the rest of the internet."

It wasn't so long ago — June 2024 — that I wrote an article with the headline "Reddit's traffic is way, way up. Like, banoodles up."

Things have changed a lot in those two short years!

Here's what happened back in 2024. Reddit was going public, and just made a deal with Google to license gazillions of posts for Google's AI training. Reddit's search traffic was also way, way up.

It saw a 39% increase in traffic from May 2023 to May 2024, according to web analytics firm Similarweb. This was a time period where other social companies saw much slower growth (and Facebook even slightly declined). Much of that was because of Google search traffic.

But that was 2024. People were only tentatively trying out these newfangled AI services like ChatGPT as a potential search replacement. Google had just launched its AI Overviews in search results in May 2024, and they didn't seem very useful — it told people to put glue in their pizza, after all.

Fast forward to 2026, and people are much more comfortable using AI services like ChatGPT instead of Googling. You can ask Muse to shop for the best air conditioner for you and even make the purchase. Google AI overviews have gotten way, way better, making it so you rarely have to actually click on a website to get your answer. Thanks to all this, search traffic has tanked across the entire internet. Plenty of publishers talk about "Google Zero," bracing for Google referral traffic to fully bottom out.

Reddit, even with the deal it cut with Google, is experiencing the truth that search traffic is easy come, easy go.

Huffman said in a letter to shareholders said that search traffic was "down meaningfully in Q3," and that in October it dropped by over 1 million referrals per week on average, and if the trend continued, it could see "a low-double-digit percentage from our current base of 130 million" daily active unique visits.

It's not all bad news, though. Reddit reported $895 million, which was an increase of 53% year-over-year. Its focus is on the logged-in user experience, which is more lucrative for advertising, since users can be more targeted. In the earnings call, Huffman noted that 80% of Reddit's monetization happens with app users and logged-in users.

There's something sad about Reddit becoming a semi-closed system; the end of an era of the open web — something that Reddit helped pioneer (and its co-founder Aaron Swartz was passionate about).

On Reddit, Huffman posted a message addressing the change to users: "I don't know about you, but as someone whose life has been defined by the open internet, it's a big change for me. But I've come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for our platform and the right decision for our business."

• Meta ran an ad touting Muse could let you see who unfollowed you on Instagram.
• Instagram has long prevented its users from doing that. Meta has since removed the ad.
• This shows a complicated tension for Meta between the goals of AI agents and its social media platforms.

Muse, the AI agent from Meta, can do many wonderful and useful things. It can help organize your inbox, book travel plans for you, and buy you lunch.

But one thing that Meta has decided it shouldn't brag about is that it can track who unfollowed you on Instagram.

About a week ago, Rachel Karten, who writes the excellent marketing newsletter Link in Bio, noticed a strange ad on Instagram. The ad encouraged people to download Muse, with an image of the fuzzy mascot holding up red and green Tinder-esque signs, suggesting you could "See who unfollowed you each week."

Finding out who unfollowed you on Instagram is something people have wanted to know since the app first launched. But Instagram — for good reasons — has avoided making this a feature on its own app.

I reached out to Meta to ask about this seeming clash, and a Meta spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that the ad had been removed and is no longer active in the Meta ad library.

Instagram doesn't want you to know your unfollows

Here's the tension: Instagram knows that people want this feature, but it also knows it would be bad for the platform's vibes.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri regularly does AMAs on his personal account, and he's answered questions about why there's no "who unfollowed me" feature. His reasoning (gone from his page but have been aggregated in other videos) is that they want to make people feel comfortable unfollowing people they're no longer interested in.

To most people, it is obvious that this feature could hurt people's feelings, especially younger users (let's assume that Instagram does care about teen users' feelings here, although I understand if you have some hesitations on that). Feeling bad while using the platform is a bad user experience!

It's also ultimately bad for Instagram. If you're reluctant to unfollow accounts you don't like, then you'll end up with a feed that's less compelling, and you'll end up opening Instagram less often or spending less time on it. That's bad for Instagram's daily active user metrics!

Yes, Muse can actually do this

There are, and have been, third-party services that can track who unfollows you. These sometimes require access to your login info in ways I definitely wouldn't recommend, and can track over time who has unfollowed you. So it's not like Muse is doing something totally novel or unheard of here.

I asked Muse to do this for me, and it said it could — with a caveat: it will start tracking my follow lists to see who unfollows me going forward, but it can't retroactively check who unfollowed me in the past (that's mostly the same as the other trackers). And honestly? I don't want to know! No thanks! Yikes!

Is this just one stupid ad? Yes. Was it set up and run as an ad by someone at Meta far removed from Instagram's philosophy on unfollows? Probably. Is it the most shocking news in the world if Meta runs a single ad and then takes it down? No.

But this interests me so much because it gets at a bigger and thornier issue. AI agents like Muse are what Meta clearly sees as the future of the company and how people use its services. But AI agents' abilities and use cases may be at odds with the nature of social media.

In the simplest way, AI agents are supposed to help you be efficient and get things done. Social media is supposed to help you waste your time.

These are two vastly different objectives — and it's going to be interesting to see how these two new technological pillars of Meta clash or complement each other.

Already, we have one Meta product (Muse) that is more than happy to do something that another Meta product (Instagram) has long discouraged.

There are plenty of other features that people want to do on social media, but Instagram and Facebook don't allow because it's bad for the overall health of the platforms. Suddenly, AI agents like Muse can do these long-forbidden things. The question is: how far is Meta willing to cannibalize the health of its own social platforms for the sake of growing its AI?

• "Liberty Biberty" is a much-hated new yellow puppet mascot for Liberty Mutual, appearing in ads.
• People are so riled up that there was a protest at its Boston HQ. Its organizer called the mascot "a disgusting little creature."
• But this kind of cheeky "hate" might actually work in Liberty's favor, an ad expert says.

On Sunday, a small crowd took to the streets of Boston to protest, holding signs, chanting, with one person even appearing in full costume and face paint. The protest took place in front of the Back Bay headquarters of insurance company Liberty Mutual. The protest was not against some sort of corporate malfeasance, political, or even a social justice issue.

They were protesting the existence of Liberty Biberty, the new fuzzy yellow mascot that appears in the insurance giant's TV ads.

People, for some reason, really hate the Liberty Biberty puppet.

There's a Facebook page with over 40,000 people devoted to hating it. There's TikToks. Reddit threads. I even saw a ghastly tattoo depicting the spherical character being fed into a meat grinder. John Oliver did a segment about it on HBO's "Last Week Tonight" recently.

The concept of the ads is surreal and self-referential. Liberty Biberty is a yellow puppet who has appeared in a few TV ads so far. In one, he appears on someone's car and tells them about the benefits of auto insurance, and then is carried off by a hawk. In another, he chats to a bored bartender, and then meets the aforementioned hunky actor prone to malapropisms.

Liberty Mutual is well aware of the, ahem, passionate response.

"We're encouraged by how strongly people are engaging with him, whether they love him or feel differently," Jenna Lebel, Liberty Mutual's chief marketing officer for US retail markets, told Business Insider. "We've been encouraged by the early results, including independent testing that shows Biberty performing above average on attention and brand attribution."

Insurance companies' advertising strategies for the last decade or more has been focused on a series of recognizable characters like Flo from Progressive, Jake from State Farm, and "Mayhem" from Allstate. Let us not forget the forefather of them all, the Geico gecko. Liberty Mutual has also had Doug and the LiMu Emu, as well as a hunky actor prone to malapropisms — hence "biberty." (Don't worry: Doug and the LiMu Emu are still active, Liberty Mutual's PR person assured me. Some complaints about Biberty were that people thought it had replaced the popular human/avian duo.)

Young people are watching less and less linear television, and so see fewer traditional ads, with one big exception: sports. Most of the people I talked to mentioned seeing the Liberty Biberty ads during baseball or football games, week after week.

The repeated exposure to the ads seems to be getting under people's skin.

"I think Liberty Bibberty is just a disgusting little creature," Connor Harvey, the organizer of the protest in Boston, told me. The 19 year old content creator from New Hampshire said that he considers himself a "sucker for weird advertising," but that the fluffy yellow orb seems to be intentional ragebait — purposely meant to be annoying.

"The new Biberty campaign has definitely sparked a conversation, with a wide range of reaction and opinion. We're listening to all of it," Lebel said.

Zach Johnson, 40, manages a machine shop in North Carolina and was inspired to start the Facebook group "Liberty Biberty Hate" after seeing the ad multiple times while watching TV with his wife one night. "It's a terrible mascot. Plus, they have more mascots than I can think of," he said.

The over-the-top hate towards the mascot is certainly a bit tongue in cheek; although some people may find it genuinely annoying, it's not offensive or tone deaf like the infamous Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad.

That means all that hate may actually be a good thing for Liberty Mutual.

"I think there's a real opportunity right now to jump in and have fun with this moment in a way that, frankly, a lot of brands would absolutely die for," said Simon Bruyn, ad industry vet and co-founder of the marketing strategy firm Significant.

"For that Gen Z and younger culture, who might be starting to get into insurance decisions, you suddenly have a very clean crossover into an internet nascent brand that feels like something you could really, really have fun with and play and own that idea of faux outrage," Bruyn said.

Harvey, the protest organizer, isn't in the market for home or auto insurance — for now. "I'm on my mom's insurance," he told me.

• I set out to see if Anthropic used Claude to draft its S-1 paperwork.
• The filing is, according to the AI detector tool Pangram, 92% human-written.
• Is that a good or bad thing? I'm not even sure!

Anthropic's much-awaited S-1 filing landed today, revealing all sorts of interesting things about the company's plans and current finances.

But the biggest question I had wasn't "does Anthropic think that accidentally destroying humanity is a business risk?" (yes) or "how much money are they losing?" (lots) or "does it feel weird to be part of the 50% of employees who don't do the pledge to donate some of their equity for the greater good?" (still wondering — if this is you, let me know).

My question was: Did they use AI to write this thing?

To find out, I ran the whole 335-page S-1 filing through Pangram, a service that checks for signs of AI-writing. Ok, well technically I tried to run it through myself, but ran into some problems with such a massive file. I reached out to Pangram CEO and cofounder Max Spero, and he ran the full file for me.

(I also reached out to Anthropic for comment about the tool's results. I haven't heard back — I suspect it's a busy day for them.)

And before you ask me why I didn't use Anthropic's official AI watermarking system to check, it's not available to normies yet.

Here's what Pangram's result was for the full 259,031 words on the S-1 filing:

Well, well, well!

So there was a tiny bit of AI use, per Pangram. It flagged some sentences and passages it said with a "high" degree of confidence contained AI use, things like: "The pace of AI development is extremely rapid, with successive versions of models emerging in compressed timeframes, often measured in months rather than years."

"My read on a result like this is that it indicates light AI editing or AI usage at the sentence level," Spero told me. "It does not seem like any significant sections of the document are fully AI-generated."

This is one of the limitations of something like Pangram, which isn't 100% perfect, and the way that people use AI tools these days for editing and proofreading might affect results.

My colleague Aki Ito ran all her LinkedIn posts and published articles here on Business Insider through Pangram as an experiment, and ended up with a tiny surprise: one sentence in one article was flagged as AI-written. When she looked back at it, she saw that ChatGPT had suggested she rephrase her original, human-written sentence, and she accepted the new wording. (I use Grammarly, an AI-powered grammar tool that mainly helps with my repeated crimes against commas, but occasionally suggests rewording, which I sometimes accept and sometimes reject, though I worry that this may get flagged as AI).

So it would appear Anthropic still had real humans — slow, expensive, fallible meatsacks — write this massive document, with just a little assist from Claude in the editing. That might be par for the course these days for IPO teams and S-1's, or at the very least the S-1's for literal AI companies. (If you're a banker who works on S-1s, shoot me an email!)

I can't tell if I think this is a good sign or a bad sign for Anthropic (and the world)?

On one hand, shouldn't Anthropic be eating its own dog food, so to speak, and proudly use its own AI for something like this? An S-1 filing is full of the kind of boilerplate, charmless, technical-ish writing that you'd assume AI would be perfect to replace a human for. If Anthropic is going to the hassle of having real (presumably highly paid humans) write out each of the 250,000+ words here, well, where is its faith in its own product? I you can't trust Claude to write your S-1, can you trust it to cure cancer?

On the other hand, thank god this isn't 100% AI-written. The stakes are pretty high when the SEC is poring over every word. If you're going to tell people your company is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, at least have a human show up and type it out, eh?

I guess bankers everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief.

• Meta says that over a quarter of Muse users made purchases with the AI agent.
• The average order was over $200 — that's a lot of clams!
• If this is you, please tell me what you're using it for.

Something just blew my mind, and I'm asking for your help to figure it out.

According to Meta's Q3 earnings call on Wednesday, more than a quarter of Muse users so far have used the AI agent make purchases — and the average order size is over $200.

I'll say that again: average order size over $200.

This is shocking to me, and I'm someone who has been actively and happily using Muse for a variety of things. I've been perfectly happy to give Muse access to my email, my calendar, my credit cards, and even my Apple health data.

But I've been slightly reticent about using it to actually buy stuff. Not that I'm totally worried about it getting stuff wrong (although the one purchase I did try to make with it was to order a salad for lunch, and it attempted to place the order on my HSA card after I failed to recognize the last 4 digits of that card, oops).

I think it's more I enjoy shopping online myself? I mean, for most things, I suppose. For "fun" stuff like clothes or personal items, I enjoy browsing and the hit of dopamine when you check out. (Others take this to the extreme, using "dopamine sites" that let you browse fake restaurants and "order" food that never arrives.) The other night I ordered — on a real site — cotton balls, razor blade refills, a plain white t-shirt, and a pair of scissors from the Target app while watching TV and even that boring purchase with a total under $30 gave me a small thrill. Why would I want to cede that joy to AI?

I understand, however, that not all purchases are fun. My colleague, Peter Kafka, used Muse to help him place an order for a new washing machine — the kind of purchase that is difficult to decide on, not particularly fun or exciting to make, and fairly expensive. Things like plane tickets, washing machines, or car insurance are in that category of stuff you have to buy, cost a lot of money, are fairly complicated to decide which option to buy, but bring very little joy during checkout.

I can understand why you might want to hand that off to an AI agent.

If you are using Muse to place big $$$ orders, what the heck are you buying?

My best guess here is that people are using Muse for airplane flights and hotels — the kind of big dollar items that are kind of annoying to book yourself, and you care mainly about just booking the right dates.

Am I right? You tell me!

Comment below, or you can email me at: knotopoulos@businessinsider.com. Or, you know, tell your Muse to email me.