Reddit Blog

There are well over a million subreddits. Even counting just large groups, there likely several thousand subreddits which have individually-specific focuses and moderation criteria. Reddit reports 100+ million active subreddits.[1] The two problems with moving to an in-house, wage-labour moderation team are that this is expensive and wage labour at prices Reddit is likely willing to pay will not meet the standards of dedicated volunteer teams. From various sources I've encountered over the years, human-based moderation peaks at somewhere between 500--1,000 items/day (multiple sources put a peak at about 700--800, though that's with very thin review). Reddit ... doesn't seem to offer stats on daily / monthly comment volume, though it claims ~60m DAU and 13 billion posts and comments overall. I'm going to SWAG[2] and assume roughly half of those have occurred in the past five years, which would mean that there are ... about 3,300 posts / comments day. Which seems low, so my SWAG's probably wrong. If 13 billion items are posted per year, then there are ~35 million items posted per day. That seems possibly high, though Facebook's claim is 5 billion items/day, so ... maybe? shrug One criteria I've suggested for moderation elsewhere is based on prevalence, which is the number of times an item is viewed. Short version: prevalence follows a power-law distribution, and as the views threshold is raised, the number of items falls off drastically. With some tuning and…

This is completely, utterly incorrect. From Reddit's own terms: > You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: ... https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement/

That's a great list. You might want to consider applying at Reddit for a PM role :) https://www.redditinc.com/careers/ I don't think reddit cares as much about third-party clients as much as being mined for data. There is a case to be made that third-party clients take away from their ad revenue in the same way that third-party Twitter clients took away from Twitter's ad revenue (Twitter's financial woes are not due to limiting third-party clients by the way). It also adds a level of complexity since all changes to the platform require API changes as well (and backward compatibility support). In fact, most, if not all, of your ideas require that a user use a first-party client. Thinking that monetizing API is a good idea is not contrarian, by the way. It's what the company is looking to do. Rolling back this decision is the contrarian approach. Semantics but worth pointing out.

> Reddit corporate does not enforce their rules on subreddit mods. There are absolutely no rules concerning moderation. As long as content policy is being followed, mods have free rein and full discretion to apply their own standards. edit: there are mod guidelines (https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-guidelines-for-healthy-co… but these are mere suggestions for healthy communities. You won't get de-modded for acting outside the guidelines.

Reddit is much larger than you think. It has over 52 million daily active users and 50+ billion monthly views. https://www.redditinc.com/

Reddit has conveniently left him out of their about page, despite being a cofounder: https://www.redditinc.com/ About Aaron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Indeed lost a child. The thing which shocked me equally was Reddit removing him from the official "about us"[1] as a co founder. As if he never existed in Reddit's history. 1: https://www.redditinc.com/#section-4

It gets better (worse?) though: reddit has removed any references to Aaron Swartz from its list of founders. https://www.redditinc.com/ > Reddit was founded in 2005 by two college friends. > Steve Huffman, Co-Founder/CEO > Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder

It's also interesting that the "over 330M active monthly users" number somehow hasn't changed in over a year now. Their site has it here, as "Last updated Nov. 12, 2017": https://www.redditinc.com/#section-3 Their official blog posts continue using that same 330M number: https://redditblog.com/2019/01/23/health-fitness-on-reddit/ The TechCrunch article does as well. Either their number of active users hasn't changed at all in over a year, or they're actually shrinking and deliberately just staying with an outdated number that looks better.

> But this is what we wanted? [...] Why do we pretend this is not intentional? I don't think in 2005 anyone expected a global, free communications network, video calling and a camera in every pocket to lead to an "epidemic of loneliness" - quite the opposite in fact. Facebook: "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." [1] Youtube: "Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world. We believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share and build community through our stories." [2] Reddit: "focused on our north star of bringing community and belonging to everyone in the world" [3] Tiktok: "Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy." [4] Apple: "We believe that business, at its best, serves the public good, empowers people around the world, and binds us together as never before." [5] Instagram: "Where everyday moments bring friends together" [6] Snapchat: "empowers people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together. It's the easiest and fastest way to communicate the full range of human emotions with your friends" [7] Discord: "Discord is about giving people the power to create space to find belonging in their lives. We want to make it easier for you to talk regularly with the people you care about. We want you to build genuine relationships with your friends and communities close to…

> The moment you post to reddit, they can do anything they want with the content. It is now theirs. This is patently false. The content is not theirs, users grant Reddit a license to their content. See the TOS [1] you spoke of: > You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: This isn't just some bit of semantics either. If you can contact the users, you could request a license for the content yourself. So really the only bastion Reddit has is technical measures for preventing scraping, since publicly accessible data is allowed to be scraped in the US due to legal precedent. That is, nothing in the TOS prevents other parties from displaying the data in other formats (as long as they don't use the API). The thing is, all the apps did make use of the API because they were not adversarial with Reddit, as opposed to webapps like libreddit that circumvent the API altogether. [1]: https://redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement

From the Reddit TOS: > 5. Your Content > The Services may contain information, text, links, graphics, photos, videos, audio, streams, software, tools, or other materials (“Content”), including Content created with or submitted to the Services by you or through your Account (“Your Content”). We take no responsibility for and we do not expressly or implicitly endorse, support, or guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any of Your Content. > By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights. > You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: https://redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-25-2023

Copying this right from the Reddit TOS for all those who consider posting anything of any value there, present or future: > You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: > When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content. (https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-february-15-2024) tl;dr: "We will be able to do anything we fucking want with anything you contribute to our site"

The announcements that they were going to charge for API access was in April. https://www.redditinc.com/blog/2023apiupdates . Mature content being restricted was mentioned in https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_regarding_r… and in https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/12ram0f/had_a_few_calls_wi… it was stated that Imgur also banned sexually explicit uploads the same day. While "yes, that was April, the law wasn't signed until May", it passed 96-0 ( https://legiscan.com/VA/votes/SB1515/2023 ) in February and the recommendations from the Governor to change it was rejected on April 12th. The timeline of when that switchover would happen was at the end of May when 3rd party developers said that they wouldn't be able to continue past June 30th. --- I don't believe that the change was "Virginia Law -> do all these things" but rather "these things are in motion... Virginia Law -> several of these things in motion must be done by July 1."

Reddit's privacy policy here seems to be pretty clear [0] > Deleting Your Account > You may delete your account information at any time from the user preferences page. You can also submit a request to delete the personal information Reddit maintains about you by following the process described below this table. When you delete your account, your profile is no longer visible to other users and disassociated from content you posted under that account. Please note, however, that the posts, comments, and messages you submitted prior to deleting your account will still be visible to others unless you first delete the specific content. After you submit a request to delete your account, it may take up to 90 days for our purge script to complete deletion. We may also retain certain information about you as required by law or for legitimate business purposes. If you say you are deleting information and they don't do it, they are violating their privacy agreement. Of course, that is in clear conflict with their TOS. [1] > When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.…

I use Apollo to read Reddit, but mod using desktop web. Definitely the Apollo and handling of the API changes is annoying. But this was much more a straw that broke the camel’s back thing from a mod perspective. I’ve mentioned this before but I am on the mod team for r/portland and the Reddit admin has been terrible at providing tools and support for serious content mod problems and straight up platform abuse. There was an incident where we had someone who stuck out as disturbed say they would be carrying out a mass shooting event. There are a lot of problematic posts but this one was so subtly wrong and the second post from the user, rewording it from another pac NW sub. IIRC, at the time there was no way to report a content type problem like this to the Reddit admin. The content reporting UX was a dark pattern, seemingly purposefully or thoughtlessly designed to avoid allowing mods to report this kind of concern. I found a category to report it to anyway, and had to follow up multiple times to get any confirmation that an actual person had received my report. When I finally did get a reply, the message was a short form letter, providing the least possible commitment to addressing the concern. It was just a terrible showing. I recall discussing this specific instance w other portland mods and how much of a bummer it was to not have the company’s support on such a serious problem. But much more pedestrian of a concern has been astroturfing. There has been a…

Also, they explicitly do have that right, as laid out by their TOS - https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement-september-12-2021 > You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: > When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

Reddit (https://www.reddit.com) | Site Reliability Engineer | Onsite (SF Bay Area) “The front page of the internet," Reddit brings over 330 million people together each month through their common interests, inviting them to share, vote, comment, and create across thousands of communities. The Reddit Infrastructure team provides a stable, humane foundation for Reddit Engineering to develop, deploy, and operate their services on. As we have continued to build out our offerings, our next step is to spread knowledge around the org about infrastructure, incident response, performance analysis and optimization, and other pertinent things pertinent to service ownership and operation. One of the pieces of this is our new Site Reliability Engineering program. As an SRE at Reddit, you'll embed within a division with the mission to share knowledge, amplify productivity, and reinforce a team that is operating services at tremendous scale. You will work on/with Kubernetes frequently and also contribute back to InfraRed, our internal infrastructure product. Automation, analysis, and optimization are some of your favorite words. If any of this sounds interesting, please see our listing below! * SRE: (SF/Bay Area): https://grnh.se/93eec9c21 SF-only for this particular position, but do check out our other remote-friendly openings across numerous functions if you are generally interested in Reddit: https://www.redditinc.com/careers

As pointed out in the sibling thread, this isn’t DDG’s fault. Reddit has an exclusive agreement with Google [1] to index Reddit content, and other web search sites are blocked. [1] https://redditinc.com/news/reddit-and-google-expand-partnership

Direct link to filing, (.pdf) https://redditinc.com/hubfs/Reddit%20Inc/Content/2025.12.12%20-%20Redd… > "In its lawsuit, Reddit said the law would have the effect of suppressing teenagers’ freedom and ability to participate in political discussions."

I read the linked article and thought OpenAI wants to communicate: "We plan our decisions to build AGI in the long term". You know, decisions like the partnership with reddit[0] a year after that announcement. [0]: https://redditinc.com/blog/reddit-and-oai-partner

News from 3 months ago: https://redditinc.com/blog/introducing-reddit-answers

Reddit is in partnership with Google Expanding our Partnership with Google https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-and-google-expand-partnership >With this partnership, and via our Data API, we’re ushering in new ways for Reddit content to be displayed across Google products by providing programmatic access to new, constantly evolving, and dynamic public posts, comments, etc., on Reddit. This enhanced collaboration provides Google with an efficient and structured way to access the vast corpus of existing content on Reddit and enables Google to use the Reddit Data API to improve its products and services – including supporting new ways to display Reddit content and providing more efficient ways to train models.

The article is based on this report, Transparency Report: July to December 2023 (https://www.redditinc.com/policies/transparency-report-july-to-decembe…

This seems to have been posted the same time as Reddit released their S-1 on going public: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddit-files-registration-statement-for…

When you post something on Reddit, you give Reddit a license to do more or less whatever it wants with the thing posted. https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement > When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content

The new reddit font (and logo) looks terrible to me. https://www.redditinc.com/blog/evolving-the-reddit-brand-a-more-access…

According to the blog post it's new today: https://www.redditinc.com/blog/evolving-the-reddit-brand-a-more-access… "We’re introducing new bespoke typefaces, Reddit Display, and Reddit Sans."

Snoo looks like he has a beard now: https://www.redditinc.com/assets/images/site/_1440xAUTO_crop_center-ce…

Yeah - it's probably fine. In 2019, it was reported that 'monthly active users' was around 430 million. [1] In 2020, it was reported that 'daily active users' was 52 million. [2] [1] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddits-2019-year-in-review/ [2] https://www.redditinc.com/blog/reddits-2020-year-in-review/ People ultimately want an app that allows them to 'break' from the real world. The app accomplishes this just as well as any of the others in the same 'feed' format space.