As the AI era begins, Reddit is leaning into its humanity

Among the things that 2023 will be remembered for is the vast amount of time the tech industry spent fretting about ever-smarter AI someday overpowering the people who created it. But one of the year’s major tech stories was the tale of an uprising that actually happened—and it was all about people, not machines.

In April, Reddit announced that it would begin charging heavy users of its API—the firehose of data from its 100,000 communities (or “subreddits”), where people share stuff on everything from science to skateboarding. As cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman explained to The New York Times’ Mike Isaac, the company was concerned by how AI giants such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft were mining the wealth of knowledge in its discussion threads to train chatbots, thereby creating new competition for Reddit while it footed the bill.

However, other users of the free API—from third-party clients such as the beloved Apollo to products that made Reddit content accessible to disabled people to subreddits with explicit content—were also in the move’s blast radius. And in June, discontent among Reddit moderators over the changes led to outright revolt. They shut down thousands of subreddits, sometimes for extended periods—a protest that, though sweeping and disruptive, did not result in major changes to Reddit’s plans.

When I asked Huffman about the moderator blackouts and their aftermath during a recent visit to Reddit headquarters in San Francisco, he defended the company’s decision to limit free access to its API as a necessary measure to foil AI-training freeloaders. “Reddit is an open platform, and we love that,” he told me. “At the same time, we have been taken advantage of by some of the largest companies in the world.”

Huffman does acknowledge missteps on Reddit’s part, especially relating to how it communicated its thinking to users. “The business decision itself, we stand by it, and we stood by it in that moment,” he says. “But I think a lot of how we worked our way through it could have been better.”

Still, as the year winds down, he doesn’t seem overly shaken by the whole saga, which got personal on both sides. In fact, he declares himself pleased with how things are going at Reddit. “It’s a nice time right now,” he says. “I think we’re executing really well.”

Heading into 2024 on a high note is crucial to the company, which is reportedly getting ready to go public. The moment would come more than two years after its confidential S-1 filing, which was originally expected to lead to an IPO last year. But Reddit’s road to public-company status has been far longer and twistier than that. It began more than 18 years ago, when Huffman and Alexis Ohanian started the company. They sold it to Condé Nast the following year, then left in 2009; Huffman returned as CEO in 2015.

Ugly though the moderator rebellion was, it reflected Reddit’s greatest strength: the deep engagement of its members. Over 50,000 moderators preside over subreddits visited by 70 million daily active users (“Redditors”). The 16 billion posts and comments they’ve created—mostly without profit as a motive—make up one of the internet’s most essential troves of unvarnished, real-world knowledge.

“I think community is a fundamental part of being human, and I think authenticity is nearly synonymous with the concept,” muses Huffman. He expresses the sentiment in the process of discussing what keeps Reddit vibrant and useful, but it also helps explain why Redditors have never tended to be shy, complaint types.

The API controversy also danced around the edges of emerging questions that may turn out to be vital to Reddit’s fate as a public company. For years, one of the best ways to get savvy answers to nettlesome everyday problems has been to perform a Google search and click on any Reddit links in the results. (While I was working on this story, that helped me troubleshoot my flaky garage door opener after the manufacturer’s site proved useless.) But what happens if conventional Googling gives way to people getting their answers directly from chatbots? Or if lowest-common-denominator AI-generated content overwhelms the internet in general? Can Reddit ensure that its foundational humanity remains an asset rather than an albatross? The answers are yet to come, but the tension is already in the air.

The basics, only better

Underneath it all, Reddit does have the bones of one of the internet’s oldest, sturdiest institutions: the message board. Hundreds of thousands of them in this case, where Redditors can share links and opinions, answer each others’ questions, or just indulge in memes and other classic forms of online play. The fundamental appeal of that proposition has made Reddit one of the U.S.’s top 10 most-trafficked websites and among the top 20 internationally, according to Similarweb.

According to Huffman, Reddit’s secret of future success mostly requires nailing the basics in ever more ambitious fashion, including continued efforts to ensure the platform appeals to the masses, not just its most committed fans.

“My belief is we have, on our platform at any point in time, as many users as the quality of our product will allow,” he says. “And so just by making it more accessible, easier on the eyes, easier to use, we tend to get bigger.”

Among the recent progress Huffman cites is Reddit’s web platform, which the company rebuilt to double its speed. It also tweaked its mobile apps for better performance and beefed up their search features in multiple ways—for instance, by adding a dedicated tab for image and video results.

Other work has addressed concerns that bubbled to the surface during the moderator dust-up, such as accessibility issues: “I told the team, ‘Just show up and ship,'” Huffman says.  The official Reddit apps are finally compatible with screen readers used by users with vision impairments, with full compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium’s accessibility guidelines planned by the end of 2024.

As for AI’s potential to transform the Reddit experience, Huffman is less prone to exuberant overpromising than the average tech company CEO. But the same attributes that led third-party assemblers of large language models to crave access to the company’s corpus of information could help it leverage the technology to its own benefit.

“There’s a lot of hype around [LLMs], but they are exceptional at processing words and language,” he says. “Reddit has a lot of words and language, and so there are a couple of areas where I think LLMs can meaningfully improve our products.”

Rather than involving the most obvious AI functionality, like a Reddit chatbot, the examples he provides relate to moderation of problem content. For instance, the latitude that individual moderators have to govern their communities means that they can set rules that Huffman describes as “sometimes strict and sometimes esoteric.” Newbies may run afoul of them by accident and have their posts yanked just as they’re trying to join the conversation.

In response, Reddit is currently prototyping an AI-powered feature. called “post guidance.” It’ll flag rule-violating material before it’s ever published: “The new user gets feedback, and the mod doesn’t have to deal with it,” says Huffman. He adds that Reddit will also use AI to crack down on willful bad behavior, such as bullying and hate speech, and that he expects progress on that front in 2024.

People and pillars

Whatever the role AI plays in Reddit’s future, the core of the platform’s value to the world is likely to remain content created by smart, helpful, sometimes unruly human beings. Along with acknowledging that 2023’s moderator kerfuffle stemmed at least in part from inadequate communications on the company’s part, Huffman emphasizes the attention it’s putting into restoring trust in recent months.

Since August, for example, he’s made 17 stops on an ongoing moderator roadshow—”Just old-fashioned relationship-building, literally shaking hands and hearing what their challenges are and what’s working well.” (Talking to mods in person was an existing Reddit practice that was put on pause during the pandemic, but the timing of its revival, coming after the summer of discontent, couldn’t have hurt.)

Along with the IRL meetings, a virtual moderator summit attracted several thousand participants. And this being Reddit, Huffman has also fielded tough questions during Ask Me Anything sessions—”One with a couple of mods who I knew were going to give me a hard time, and they delivered,” he says.

As Reddit continues down the path to an IPO, more grillings are inevitable. In a June AMA, Huffman didn’t challenge one questioner’s premise that the company had become “increasingly profit-driven.” Instead, he said that it would indeed continue to be a driving factor until the then-unprofitable company was in the black. A spokesperson declined to give me an update on Reddit’s financial status, citing its current quiet period. But signs of the energy the company is putting into turning its popularity into profit are everywhere.

During my Reddit visit, Huffman walked me through the three pillars of this effort. There’s advertising, of course, a revenue stream Reddit is currently girding itself to maximize. In September, it announced it would stop allowing users to opt out of ad personalization “except in select countries,” irking some members who prized the ability to avoid targeted marketing. However, Huffman argues that the nature of Reddit’s organization around shared interests lets it avoid privacy-violating harvesting of user activity: “You go to the skiing subreddit, you see an ad for some ski pants—the math’s not that complicated,” he says.

Pillar two is data. That one turned controversial when Reddit moved to monetize its knowledge graph by charging some users of its API, and most coverage has zoomed in on training AI algorithms as a use-case scenario. But Huffman also points to other, less fraught monetization opportunities, “such as brands who just want to know what people are saying about them or their competitors.”

Huffman’s final pillar, the platform’s user economy, could develop the most uniquely Reddit-esque spin. Members already engage in acts of commerce such as tipping Photoshop wizards to remove ex-boyfriends from images; he says the company plans to facilitate these transactions with a payment system “that will basically involve users sending money to users, whether it’s rewarding them for content or paying for digital services or digital goods or [physical] services.”

“People are trying to start businesses on Reddit, but it wasn’t really built for that,” he adds. “So just trying to flesh out that ecosystem, I think that’ll be very powerful.” He doesn’t delve into further details, but it sounds considerably more ambitious than the Reddit Coins virtual currency the company ditched in July.

That Reddit is only now exploring some of these opportunities in earnest shows that the company is still a work in progress, close to two decades after Huffman and Ohanian founded it. When I ask Huffman what 2005 Steve might have made of the site in its present form he gets nostalgic—but then quickly turns the conversation back to the current quest to prove Reddit can be something more than an extremely popular money pit.

Back when the site was new, “I submitted most of the content for the first couple of months myself—I had all these different accounts,” he remembers. “And sometime in August [2005] was the first day that I didn’t submit any content. Real users did. And literally every day since then, Reddit has been bigger than I ever thought it would be.”

Even when Huffman left the company more than four years later, it was unclear whether the then-thriving community would ever make money. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s not really a business—it’s like this homework assignment that got out of hand,'” he says. “And so the fact that this is a real business today, and a growing business, really surprises me.” Making sure it doesn’t startle anyone else is part of the challenge ahead.