Dear Friends
During our childhood days, the most engaging places in the morning or evening times would be the Tea Stalls and Barber shops. People often visit them not just to sip the tea but to listen and participate in the most engaging conversations. They would range from politics to business. Similarly, barber shops used to be hook centres for entertaining discussions, street gossip, and many more!! In these Tea stalls, there would be 3-4 people to make the discussion active. The rest of the visitors keep an eye and lend an ear to them, while scanning through the newspaper. They will not have the ability to overpower those 3-4 debaters, but give them thumbs up with their nods. I hope many of you might have experienced this.
Did you see any such Tea shops and Barber shops now? Did you observe that these Tea shops have transformed into Coffee Clubs? You can observe a few customers silently sitting in one corner of these shops and browsing through their mobiles. Similarly, these Barber shops are transitioning to Salons, in some advanced locations, to unisex salons! What do you observe there? Again, customers are hooked to screens, scrolling through a few reels. Those engaging conversations have become old-fashioned!
In fact, in those days, especially in rural villages, these shops also acted as social cops! They used to enquire like a friendly interrogation — Where are you coming from? Whose house are you visiting? What are you doing? How much salary are you earning and so on? In fact, whenever we used to go to our grandfather’s village, we used to encounter these questions. Surprisingly, by the time we reach our grandfather’s village (we need to cross 2-3 villages on foot or by bullock cart), these cycle peddlers used to share with our grandfather that we were visiting! This is the kind of neural network that runs there. They used to be much more powerful than AI-based artificial neural networks (ANNs) or Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs).
Why am I bringing this conversation up? A recent study (Semrush, June 2025) analysed 150,000 citations across AI outputs from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others — using 5,000+ diverse keywords. Can you guess who is supplying the most information to these LLMs like ChatGPT? You might think Google or Facebook, right? No, surprisingly, 40.1% of citations are coming from Reddit. Next, with Wikipedia 26.3%, YouTube 23.5%, Google 23.3%, StackOverflow 18.7%, etc. As per Steve Nouri, Reddit is now the #1 training source for AI. Reddit isn’t just a forum anymore — it’s the backbone of generative AI.
What does this mean for Builders, Brands, and Founders? Conversations > Content! Authority is being redefined (Not by domain age). A 20,000-word blog post has no significance, but Active Reddit threads, Engaging X posts, and YouTube explainer videos make all the difference. Trust is being crowdsourced. Community is your new homepage!!
Will there be any impact on the UX strategy of product and services companies? Yes, definitely! When we were studying RDBMS (Relational Database Management Systems), information was arranged in rows and columns! For many years, storing an image in the database was a luxury until object databases came. Today, your PDF document, your reel, or your picture on a webpage are all considered as database feeds for your LLMs.
Did you observe any other changes?
Ravi Saripalle
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