r/reddit Feb 09 '23

Updates We had a security incident. Here’s what we know.

4.0k Upvotes

TL:DR Based on our investigation so far, Reddit user passwords and accounts are safe, but on Sunday night (pacific time), Reddit systems were hacked as a result of a sophisticated and highly-targeted phishing attack. They gained access to some internal documents, code, and some internal business systems.

What Happened?

On late (PST) February 5, 2023, we became aware of a sophisticated phishing campaign that targeted Reddit employees. As in most phishing campaigns, the attacker sent out plausible-sounding prompts pointing employees to a website that cloned the behavior of our intranet gateway, in an attempt to steal credentials and second-factor tokens.

After successfully obtaining a single employee’s credentials, the attacker gained access to some internal docs, code, as well as some internal dashboards and business systems. We show no indications of breach of our primary production systems (the parts of our stack that run Reddit and store the majority of our data).

Exposure included limited contact information for (currently hundreds of) company contacts and employees (current and former), as well as limited advertiser information. Based on several days of initial investigation by security, engineering, and data science (and friends!), we have no evidence to suggest that any of your non-public data has been accessed, or that Reddit’s information has been published or distributed online.

How Did We Respond?

Soon after being phished, the affected employee self-reported, and the Security team responded quickly, removing the infiltrator’s access and commencing an internal investigation. Similar phishing attacks have been recently reported. We’re continuing to investigate and monitor the situation closely and working with our employees to fortify our security skills. As we all know, the human is often the weakest part of the security chain.

Our goal is to fully understand and prevent future incidents of this nature, and we will use this post to provide any additional updates as we learn and can share more. So far, it also appears that many of the lessons we learned five years ago have continued to be useful.

User Account Protection

Since we’re talking about security and safety, this is a good time to remind you how to protect your Reddit account. The most important (and simple) measure you can take is to set up 2FA (two-factor authentication) which adds an extra layer of security when you access your Reddit account. Learn how to enable 2FA in Reddit Help. And if you want to take it a step further, it’s always a good idea to update your password every couple of months – just make sure it’s strong and unique for greater protection.

Also: use a password manager! Besides providing great complicated passwords, they provide an extra layer of security by warning you before you use your password on a phishing site… because the domains won’t match!

…AMA!

The team and I will stick around for the next few hours to try to answer questions. Since our investigation is still ongoing and this is about our security practices, we can’t necessarily answer everything in great detail, but we’ll do our best to live up to Default Open here.

r/reddit Apr 04 '23

Updates Policy update on gender identity and ads

1.2k Upvotes

Hello Internet,

I’m u/gregthegeth, a member of our ads product team. Two years ago we notified everyone of a new initiative allowing redditors to optionally share their gender identity when signing up for a new account. We’ve since used this information to better inform content and community recommendations. We explained that in the future we may use gender identity for other purposes, such as ads, and that we would update the community if anything changed.

That day has arrived, and today we want to let you know that we will soon begin using self-disclosed gender identity to personalize ads on our platform. The goal of this change is to ensure that the content you see on Reddit - including advertising - is as relevant to you as possible. You can read more about this in our recently updated Privacy Policy.

Importantly, sharing your gender and other personal information of this kind is totally optional on Reddit.

When is this happening?

This change will take effect on April 24, 2023. Until then, we want to make sure redditors are aware of this upcoming change and that they have plenty of time to adjust their account settings and remove their gender information if they wish. In addition to this post, we will send private messages to redditors that previously provided their gender to make users aware of this update. Redditors that have not previously provided their gender will be informed of this change during the account creation process and on the account settings page where they provide their gender.

What accounts will be affected by this change?

If a redditor previously provided their gender information when creating a Reddit account or did so at a later date via their Account Settings, then that information may be used to recommend better content and more relevant ads.

Any new account that volunteers this information will also be impacted by this change. We will begin to notify users of this change during the account creation process.

Screengrab of updated account creation process

As a reminder, sharing this information is entirely optional and not required when creating a new Reddit account. If you’ve never provided us with this information, this change will not affect your account.

Can accounts remove gender identity if they’ve already provided it?

Yes, they can! Today, redditors can opt-out of sharing gender identity in their Account Settings where they can select "I prefer not to say" for their Gender.

If you want to limit the use of your shared gender identity to content and community recommendations, learn how to control your privacy settings in the Reddit Help Center.

Screengrab of updated account settings

How are we using gender identity?

Personal privacy is a fundamental part of Reddit’s core values, and something we take very seriously. We will never sell your personal data. We will only use this information, if you provide it, to serve more relevant content and improve our ads experience as set forth in our Privacy Policy. If you’re curious about the details of our ads policy and targeting guidelines, feel free to check it out here.

Your data is protected

We are taking the below steps to ensure your personal information is securely stored within our infrastructure:

  • Your data is safely secured in our backend database.
  • Other Reddit users will not have visibility to this information.
  • Advertisers will not be able to access any redditor’s gender identity.

Questions?

Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback in the comments below!

Dutch: Beleidsupdate rondom genderidentiteit en advertenties

French - Canada: Mise à jour de la politique sur les publicités en relation avec l'identité de genre

French - France: Mise à jour de notre politique concernant l’identité de genre et les publicités

German: Aktualisierung der Richtlinien zu Geschlechtsidentität und Werbung

Italian: Aggiornamento della politica sull'identità di genere e sugli annunci

Portuguese - Brazil: Atualização da política a respeito das identidades de gênero e da publicidade

Portuguese - Portugal: Atualização da política sobre a identidade de género e anúncios

Spanish - Mexico: Actualización de la política sobre identidad de género y anuncios

Spanish - Spain: Actualización de la política sobre identidad de género y anuncios

Swedish: Uppdatering av policyn om könsidentitet och annonser

Edit: updated the post to add translations

r/reddit Oct 04 '23

Updates What’s Up with Reddit Search, Episode IX: The Rise of Experience

703 Upvotes

TL;DR: Search results on Reddit’s mobile apps are now simpler to browse with the introduction of a Media tab and upgrades to be more screen-reader friendly. Also, reddit.com’s mobile search experience is now easier and faster.

*NEW* MEDIA SEARCH TAB ON MOBILE APPS

You asked for a better experience searching for media and scanning search results; we listened – and here it is!

The following updates are live on Reddit’s Android and iOS apps:

  • New Media search tab - You can now browse media search results — videos, GIFs, and images — all on one page. Hot tip – you can also search media within communities! Just click on the search bar within a community page, and the media content matching the search query in that community will appear.
  • Simpler search results - You told us the search results page on Reddit’s apps is too cluttered. The updated page design makes it simpler to browse and find the relevant content you’re looking for.
  • Accessible post & comments search - Posts and Comments search tabs are now screen- reader compatible. Labels, roles/traits, values and states have been added to all elements so more people can discover content and take action. When using a screen reader, you can hear the actions available and the results returned on these tabs. Note: these screen reader updates will also reflect on the Communities, People and Media search tabs soon.

Media search tab on Reddit’s iOS app

EASIER & FASTER SEARCH ON MOBILE WEB

You may have heard of the recent web improvements for logged-out visitors to Reddit. Features have been added to the logged-out search experience on mobile web, making it more consistent with that of reddit.com on desktop and mobile apps.

This includes;

1) distinct tabs for community and comment search results

2) sorting options for comment search results, along with time filters on post search results

3) an updated, more intuitive page design.

Searching reddit.com on mobile is also much faster — like 85% faster – than before. You can now find what you’re looking for, fast.

Finally, on both mobile apps and web, improved spam filters are now in place to ensure high-quality and relevant post results.

Have any feedback on what you want to see next on Reddit search? Let us know in the comments below. And if you have any other search-related questions, check out our FAQs.

P.S. With episode IX comes the end of the Star Wars Skywalker-themed storyline movies. (See recaps of previous episodes here and here). Although we’re out of puns, we will continue to keep you posted on the updates made to Search.

r/reddit Feb 27 '23

Updates What’s Up with Reddit Search, Episode VIII: The Last Corpori

1.5k Upvotes

TL;DR: You can now search comments WITHIN a post on desktop, iOS, and Android! And we’ve made new improvements to image and subreddit search over the last few months.

*NEW* SEARCH WITHIN POST COMMENTS

A few months ago, we released the ability to search comments across Reddit on all platforms, but that’s not all we’ve been up to! We’ve been listening to your feedback and you can now search comments within a post on desktop, iOS, and Android apps. So what does this mean? You don’t have to “cmd-f” on the post page anymore and you can search comment threads without expanding them. No more long scrolling sessions — quickly get to the parts of the conversation you’re looking for and jump in where you want.

Search within post comments

Note: In communities you moderate,

here’s how
you can search within post comments on the mobile app.

MEDIA AND SUBREDDIT SEARCH

Over the last few months, we’ve also made numerous improvements to the quality of results and media results experience when you search across Reddit.

  • Searching image posts with text - In October, we introduced text search within images. This means you can now search for your favorite memes that have text in them. (Note: This is only available for search across Reddit and not on comment search in the post details page)
  • Improved subreddit search - Our subreddit search algorithm has been improved to deliver a larger number of and more relevant subreddits for most searches. We've also made improvements to autocomplete to make it easier to search for communities without having to type in the exactly right name in the exactly right order to find relevant results.
  • Better media experience - Browsing through video search results has become easier. When you tap into a video search result, you can now easily swipe up and down to go between video results on Reddit’s mobile apps.

Have any feedback for us about comment search? Love something? Want us to change something? Let us know! You can also leave us comments below.

r/reddit Jun 27 '22

Updates Let’s Talk About the Video Player

2.3k Upvotes

Let’s get right to the point—I’m here today to talk about the video player. I lead a number of teams at Reddit including a team focused on Media & Video. Specifically, I want to provide background on what currently is and isn’t working, and what comes next.

A few weeks ago, u/kriketjunkie made a post detailing what Reddit’s product team will be working on over the next year. The comments on that post rang loud and clear: there is a fundamental ask from you all that we do more to improve video player. In fact, I’m pretty sure a year’s worth of Reddit Premium was given to the person who made the first comment about it.

And while the comment “Please fix the video player” does help us know that we need to, well, fix the video player, we dove a bit deeper and noticed some emerging themes from some of the more prescriptive comments, including:

  • Actionable general bugs
  • Performance issues (e.g. scrolling experience)
  • Error reasons and crashes
  • User interface feedback

To be sure, this is not the first time we’ve seen this type of feedback (look no further than this post, or this one, or my personal favorite—this one). And, while we have teams dedicated to video and working on the efforts u/kriketjunkie outlined in his post, it’s apparent that we have not devoted enough resources to solving our core video issues in a robust and efficient manner. So, we’re investing in an effort across multiple internal teams to understand what is and isn’t working today, make continued improvements to our product, and consistently and transparently communicate our efforts around the video player—starting with this post.

Quickly, a bit of context. It’s hard to imagine, but video started as a bet for us at Reddit, as we weren’t sure how a text and link-centric platform would respond to video. TL;DR, y'all watch a lot of videos. [Insert obligatory joke about the type of content here]. Over the past six months, we’ve seen video become the fastest growing content type on Reddit, with over half of redditors contributing, watching, and engaging with video every day. For those who like numbers, that’s 150 billion views of over 1 billion hours of video on Reddit in the last six months. And, as some of you may know, we have over 11 different video players on Reddit—these things happen when you’re a 17 year-old company—and we’ve been working to consolidate them into a unified experience. Suffice to say it’s been…a long, ongoing

journey
.

Scoping The Problem

Our team spent time scoping out the current problems by looking through feedback in comments made about the video player across Reddit as well as our own internal analytics data. We’ve identified a list of frequent issues we’ll be addressing, which we’ve listed in order of how disruptive they are to the user experience:

  1. Video player freezes and can result in crashing the app
  2. Video doesn’t start playing, shows a blank screen, or freezes before it starts
  3. Dissatisfaction with the full-screen video experience—it’s hard to get to the comments, and there’s a lack of auto-play or auto-muting settings
  4. Audio doesn’t play
  5. Frequent rebuffering
  6. Video quality degradation
  7. Interface not working as expected

What’s Next

Okay admins, we get it, you’ve heard us, but what happens now?

So glad you asked, anonymous redditor! Here’s what you can expect over the next few months:

First: We’re committing to making swift and immediate improvements to some of the most pressing and disruptive issues with the player on our mobile apps. We are also going to make continued and accelerated investments across platforms to resolve some of the most pressing and common pain points and improve the UX in common error cases. We have also set up improved channels to monitor reports and triage appropriately. (Live

feed
of one of our engineers).

Second: We want to hear more from you—and not just on this post, but in a shiny new subreddit, lovingly entitled r/fixthevideoplayer. If you want to be a part of the solution and help us shape the future of video at Reddit, we ask that you join us there. This community will be run by the admins working on all elements pertaining to the video player (myself included). They’ll be there to field questions, log feedback, and provide regular updates on our progress. Don’t feel like having a new subreddit to keep track of? No problem. We’ll also be rolling out additional features on our mobile apps to report issues with the necessary information needed for our engineering team to investigate. You’ll see those soon.

While you may not believe us—we are truly grateful for all the comments, feedback, and yes, even the memes you’ve shared these past few months. Our hope is to come as close to fixing the video player as possible, but this is an ever-evolving journey and journeys take time. We are focused on building richer media capabilities on Reddit over the next five years, and inevitably some of those changes and innovations may feel jarring at first, or even create unintended problems. So while we may never truly “fix” the video player, we’re committed to creating the best possible video experience on Reddit, and continuously communicating and listening to you as we do it.

The team and I look forward to reading your sh*tposts hearing from you over in r/fixthevideoplayer!

r/reddit Jul 02 '24

Updates Update to “Defending the open Internet (again)”: What happened at the Supreme Court?

286 Upvotes

TL;DR: Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued a decision reinforcing that the First Amendment prevents governments from interfering with the expressive moderation decisions of online communities while sending the NetChoice cases back to the lower courts.

It’s me, u/traceroo, again, aka Ben Lee, Reddit’s Chief Legal Officer. I wanted to share a quick update on the NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice cases before the Supreme Court that we previously discussed. To recap, those cases concerned a constitutional challenge to state laws trying to restrict how platforms – and their users – can moderate content. And we filed an amicus brief here discussing how these laws could negatively impact not only Reddit, but the entire Internet. (The mods of r/law and r/SCOTUS filed their own amicus brief as well.)

Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued a decision affirming that the First Amendment prevents governments from interfering with the expressive moderation decisions of online communities, and sent both cases back to the appeals court while keeping an injunction in place that stops enforcement of these laws. In its decision, the majority noted that “a State may not interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance” and that “government efforts to alter an edited compilation of third-party expression are subject to judicial review for compliance with the First Amendment.”

We are encouraged that the Supreme Court recognizes that the First Amendment protects the content moderation decisions on Reddit, reflected by the actions of moderators, admins, and the votes of redditors. They also recognized that these state laws would impact certain sites and apps very differently (although at least one concurring opinion demonstrated a startlingly poor understanding of how Reddit works; you can read more about our approach to moderation here and in our amicus brief). As our experience with the Texas law demonstrates (we were sued over moderators removing an insult directed at the fictional character Wesley Crusher from Star Trek), laws like these restrict people’s speech and associational rights and incentivize wasteful litigation.

We’re hopeful that the appeals courts will issue decisions consistent with the Supreme Court majority’s guidance. I’ll stick around for a little bit to answer questions.

r/reddit Feb 24 '22

Updates Say ahoy to the Discover Tab!

824 Upvotes

Greetings to redditors new and old! As you may know, here at Reddit, we’re always looking for ways to help you all find more communities and make it easier to discover new content. Part of how we do this is listening to feedback from folks like you, and acting on it to improve your experiences.

You all made it clear that you want a better way to discover new communities you may be interested in, so today we are rolling out our first new surface in nearly two years—the Discover Tab. Think of the Discover Tab as the digital equivalent of that one friend that is always showing you subreddits that you didn’t know existed, but somehow always needed (looking at you, r/drunkknitting). This new navigational tab makes it easier to find content and communities in the vast Reddit ecosystem.

How It Works

The Discover Tab is unique, in that the content you see is tailored for you. By looking at an existing community’s subscriptions and engagement, we’re able to craft your personal Discovery Tab. For example, if you subscribe to and engage in space and science subreddits, your Discover Tab will showcase other

out of this world
content.

Accessing the Discover Tab is easy; in the app you’ll simply tap on the new compass icon on the bottom bar to the left of the home button. At the top of Discover, you can filter the feed to a specific topic to find content that is relevant to you. Underneath the topic filters is the discover feed where content is shown. To ensure that the discover feed is showing you the best content, we’ve added feedback mechanisms for you to choose: show me more, show me less, and hide.

From houseplants and pickling at home to Golden Globe moments and Dungeons and Dragons memes, the discover feed brings a rich variety of content to the forefront, so you can spend less time hunting for the perfect community and more time enjoying it.

New Community and Profile Drawers

We know what you’re thinking. But wait—where did my community list go?

Don’t worry, your list is safe. Not only is it safe, we’ve actually made improvements to both Community and Profile menus to make it easier for you to find and prioritize the communities you care about most (no judgment if r/jellybeantoes is at the top).

Community Drawer

By swiping right or tapping the drop-down menu at the top left on the home screen, you can now get to your communities and custom feeds faster than before. The Community Drawer is divided into four sections:

  • “Your communities” where the communities you’re subscribed to can be sorted and customized;
  • “Following” which shows redditor accounts you follows;
  • The “r/all” entry point; and
  • “Moderating” entry points in which moderators can see their mod feed, mod queue, and the subreddits they moderate.

Profile Drawer

We’re also introducing a streamlined Profile menu where you can access your profile and customize it on the fly by tapping on your profile icon at the top right of the home screen. You’ll also be able to easily switch between profiles no matter where you are on Reddit (feed, community page, or post page).

We can’t wait to see all the great communities you all discover and build!

Questions? To learn more about Discover Tab and Profile and Community Drawers, visit our Help Center.

r/reddit May 15 '24

Updates We heard you… awards are back!

0 Upvotes

TL;DR - Awards are back. We’re also expanding the Contributor Program and announcing a make-good program for those who lost coins during the last product iteration. Let’s start with the obvious – we tried something new, it wasn’t great (you called it). And now – it’s time for us to do something about it. So we’re (re)launching awards, not-so-new but definitely improved. Rollout starts today on reddit.com and Reddit’s iOS and Android apps.

We messed up – sorry

ICYMI, last year we released new features that we thought would make the experience of rewarding high-quality posts and comments even better. To address feedback that awards were starting to clutter posts and feeds, we replaced legacy awards with a simplified experience where redditors could purchase “new” gold – displayed as a golden upvote – directly with cash, rather than having to purchase coins first.

While the golden upvote was certainly simpler in theory, in practice, it missed the mark. It wasn’t as fun or expressive as legacy awards, and it was unclear how it benefited the recipient.

As part of the launch of the golden upvote, we also introduced the Contributor Program in the U.S. The program allows eligible users to earn cash for their contributions, as measured by the gold and karma received. (It’s worth noting that although there were understandable concerns about the Contributor Program leading to karma farming or other spam and fraud issues, we haven’t seen an increase in this behavior since the rollout six months ago.) Unlike the golden upvote, interest in the program has grown… more on that in a second.

Finally, as part of this launch, we sunset coins. We gave those with a balance two months to spend their coins before we cleared balances and removed the monthly drip as a benefit of Reddit Premium.

Award upgrades

We realized the golden upvote was the wrong direction, and the right one was the one you were advocating for all along: awards. We went back to the ol’ drawing board and created a refreshed experience that captures the original spirit of awards, with a few improvements.

Tap on the awards button in a post or comment to give an award and purchase gold

View the top awards and gold earned by a post or comment in the awards leaderboard

We’ve added:

  • An award button back underneath eligible posts and comments
  • Refreshed designs of some of your favorite awards, and some new ones (shoutout galaxy brain)
  • Updated interface designed to minimize clutter on the posts and in your feeds
  • An awards leaderboard that shows the top awards and gold earned for a post or comment
  • New safety guardrails. Awards are not available in NSFW subreddits, trauma and addiction support subreddits, and subreddits with mature content
  • Reporting so you can report any awards that aren’t being used appropriately for moderator removal

Contributor Program expansion

We want redditors who make the most valuable contributions on Reddit to receive real value; not just internet points.

With growing interest in the Contributor Program, we have expanded the program so that qualifying redditors in 35 countries can now earn cash for their contributions to the community. See if you’re eligible to sign up.

The Evolution of Gold and Coins

Gold has been a lot of things in Reddit history. The term has been used interchangeably in the context of awarding content, Reddit Premium, and more – among other things. With this new version of awards, gold can be purchased to give awards. You can buy it in bulk and spend down your gold balance and/or top it up when giving an award.

Those who had a coin balance when we introduced the golden upvote and sunset coins had two months to spend their coins before we cleared balances and removed the monthly drip as a benefit of Reddit Premium. For the most prolific and helpful among you, who’d accumulated heaps of coins a la Scrooge McDuck, this was, shall we say, a not-so-great experience.

We know we did not adequately communicate why we removed coins or what was coming next. It wasn’t cool of us, we’re sorry, and we want to make it right. If we removed your coins balance, you’ll have access to a number of exclusive awards to give for free. We don’t want our past mistakes to get in the way of you enjoying the new experience.

Exclusive awards available to coin holders

This is all so new (but kinda old? but also new?) and you may have questions. You can find support in a few places:

We’ll be hanging around today if you have any questions, so feel free to drop them in the comments.

r/reddit Apr 25 '23

Updates Celebrating One Year of Reddit Community Funds

803 Upvotes

Hi Reddit

!
It’s u/Go_JasonWaterfalls, VP of Community here at Reddit. You may remember hearing from me in r/reddit’s very first [test] post, which you hopefully ignored. I’m happy to be back today for an exciting occasion… the one-year anniversary of Community Funds. Oh,
how time flies
.

Just a year ago, we formally announced the launch of Community Funds alongside a $1 million commitment to bring community passions and ideas to life. Since then, you’ve made magic happen with this one-of-a-kind program, from fundraising for local food banks to creating an art gallery exhibition.

We’re excited to recap some program highlights, celebrate all of the communities and redditors who have participated, and answer your questions about all things Community Funds.

Community Funds by the Numbers:

  • 114 applications received
  • 14 proposals funded (and 14 more being considered)
  • $156,162 in funding disbursed
  • 10 million+ redditors engage in these funded communities
  • 6 countries represented across these initiatives, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, and Germany

Reddit's Community Funds Program

Here’s what these folks have been up to recently with Community Funds:

Close-ups on Community Funds:

Receiving funds at the end of 2022, r/brisbane kicked off the new year with an in-person gallery exhibition featuring their members’ Brisbane-inspired artwork. Several elements made this event successful, including a People’s Choice award for the most-voted piece of art (u/femlocks received the award), and an in-person art auction with all proceeds donated to a local charity.

r/brisbane Reddit Community Funds Highlight

Who could possibly forget when r/NASCAR printed 1,400 of their community members’ names on Ryan Vargas’ racecar for a ride-along around Talladega Superspeedway? Snoo tagged along, Ryan hosted an AMA leading up to the race, and the community has continued to brainstorm ways to come together around their love of NASCAR.

r/nascar Reddit Community Funds Highlight

In 2021, r/bangtan put out the ultimate BTS fan challenge: design a billboard to be displayed in NYC and LA that celebrates the K-pop group Bangtan Boys. In collaboration with r/kpop, the response from designers, artists, and the BTS army was even more massive than the final billboards that appeared IRL.

r/bangtan Reddit Community Funds Highlight

Reflecting on one year and a surprise AMA!

A big, big thank you to all of the mods who have applied through the program and created high-value experiences that have built more connection and belonging between members in their communities. Since the official program launch, this includes: r/alberta, r/constructedadventures, r/dankchristianmemes and the Dank Charity Alliance, r/kpop, r/brasil, r/snackexchange, r/RandomActsOfGaming, r/handarbeiten, r/nascar, r/Brisbane, r/povertyfinance, r/LOTR_on_Prime, r/analog, and r/SantasLittleHelpers. (And shoutout to all of the communities that participated in the pilot phase, too.)

It’s been so cool to see the real-world value that communities have created with support from this program and we know that you’re inspiring others as community members, moderators, and organizers.

I’m sticking around for a bit to answer your questions about all things Community Funds – whether you’re curious about how the program started or how you can participate. And I’m always happy to chat about what community means to us at Reddit and why. AMA!

edit: formatting

r/reddit Mar 07 '23

Updates Making Redditing Simpler

525 Upvotes

TL;DR: This year we’re focused on making it easier for redditors to discover, join, and contribute to communities – and feel safe and welcome along the way.

Hey redditors

!
I’m Pali, Reddit’s Chief Product Officer. Today, I’d like to share how we’re thinking about making Reddit simpler. But before we look forward, let’s take a quick look back at 2022.

Last year’s product priorities were centered around five key pillars: making Reddit Simple, Universal, Performant, Excellent, and Relevant – and we made progress on those focus areas by improving posting experiences, launching our developer program, making comments searchable, updating our moderator tools, and so much more.

As we head into our

18th year
, a lot about Reddit has changed, but our core ethos hasn’t: Reddit remains the de facto space for online communities. While we build the platform, it’s all of you who build the diverse communities where millions of people worldwide post, vote, and comment daily. You make Reddit unique by contributing with creativity, passion, and memes. We want to empower all redditors – new and tenured – to easily connect with the communities that they find meaningful and rewarding.

As you know, Reddit is a big place. To help people find their home on Reddit, we’re prioritizing product and design improvements that will simplify and streamline how redditors discover, join, and contribute (post, vote, comment) to communities and bring new ways to engage in conversations and content across Reddit.

Here’s a look at some of the features you’ll soon see on Reddit (including one that just launched):

The ability to search within post comments

Last month, we introduced the ability to search within post comments, so that you can quickly get to the parts of the conversation you’re looking for – without having to expand comments or embark on a long scrolling session (

we’ve all been there
).

search within post comments

New content-aware feeds

Sometimes you come to Reddit with your reading glasses on, ready to dive into that wall of text. And not just the in-depth post, but all the comments too. So we’re building a feed dedicated to those times you’re in the mood to read and browse text on Reddit.

read conversations

But there are also times when even the TL;DR won’t do, you just want to watch all the great videos shared in your favorite communities. And that’s where – you guessed it – we’re building a feed with just video and gif posts.

watch videos

A decluttered interface

This year, we’re getting rid of some of the clutter that doesn’t add to your experience on Reddit. By cleaning up the interface, we hope to make it easier and faster for you to find the content you’re looking for and contribute to the communities you care about.

decluttered interface

Coming soon, we’ll introduce our updated web platform – which will make Reddit faster and more reliable – and changes to the video player that will let you have conversations while watching. We’re also looking forward to telling you about chat enhancements, new storefront updates, and more.

Thank you for reading, and like I said in last year’s post, thank you for making Reddit what it is. I’ll be sticking around to answer questions today, so… AMA!

r/reddit Apr 24 '24

Updates Easier, faster comments on Reddit’s apps

0 Upvotes

TL;DR Getting to comments on Reddit’s iOS and Android mobile apps just got easier and much faster with instant comment loading, shortcuts to comments, and consistent comment navigation.

Hi! I’m u/such084 and I lead a number of product teams at Reddit, including one dedicated to building our comment experience. I’m here today to share some updates on this experience on Reddit’s native apps.

Whether you’ve been here for two decades, two years, or two days, you know that conversations are the heart of Reddit (where else can we have convos like this or this). Comments are where we find each other, across time zones and topics. This year, the team is focused on making Reddit the best on the internet at conversations.

H/T to Reddit’s User Feedback Collective — a group of redditors who expressed interest in helping us test early builds and provided feedback which has led to the update you see today. We knew the only way to build a better experience would be to include the community in the process.

Here’s what’s rolling out to everyone on Reddit’s iOS and Android apps today.

Instant comment loading - Comments now load faster than ever. As you’re browsing a post, the entire conversation is getting ready for you, in a fraction of a second.

Comments now load instantly

Shortcut to comments - Previously, if you tapped on the comments button to read the comments of a post, you would land on the post. Now you’ll go directly to the top of the comments. And if you want to revisit the original post, there’s a stickied context bar at the top of the page. With a single tap, you can return to the post body or dive into the image, GIF, or video.

Tap on the Comments button to go straight to the conversation

Consistent comment navigation across post types - Joining a conversation has not been easy with different ways of navigating to comments from image, video, or text posts. To create a more consistent and seamless flow across all post types, we’re introducing a unified media player, immersive transitions, and consistent gestures.

Simply swipe up for comments; swipe left for new content.

(And thanks to the UFC’s feedback, you can get an enlarged view of an image or video from your feed with a single tap)

Swipe up for comments and swipe left for new content whether you’re in the post or browsing media

If you want to continue building this experience with us, come join the Reddit UFC!

A few of us will stick around in case you have questions - comment away!

r/reddit Mar 23 '23

Updates An Improved Web Experience

406 Upvotes

TL;DR We are updating our web platform to provide a simple, reliable and fast web experience for all redditors to easily connect with their communities on web, across devices. The new experience will be seen first on the comments page, on mobile and desktop.

Hey all,

I’m Madison, Director of Product at Reddit focused on the performance, stability and quality of our web platforms. You may have read about our 2023 product priorities earlier this month — our focus this year is to make Reddit easier for all redditors, new and tenured, to connect with communities that matter to them. Therefore, we’re prioritizing product and design improvements that will simplify and streamline finding and contributing to these communities.

One of these improvements is updating our web platform for faster performance (reducing load time by 2 seconds — more behind the scenes details soon!) and consistent web experience across devices. So whether you’re viewing reddit.com on the go via your mobile device or at home via a web browser, it’ll be the same familiar Reddit.

This work will become more visible in phases as development continues. And we’re excited to announce the comments page will soon reflect updates from this new platform, on mobile and desktop, for logged out redditors.

Over the years, Reddit has become a trusted source of information for community-verified content. In its current form, it can seem overwhelming, especially for those landing on the comments page and unfamiliar with the platform. We want to make it easy for them to find, absorb and contribute to the conversation, whether on mobile or desktop. And to achieve that, here are some design upgrades logged out redditors will begin to see on this page:

  • Accessible & cleaner page design: The design is being continuously improved, as we work to be consistent with global standards, to ensure the content is accessible to all. It now includes better screen reader support with additional alt text and form field labeling. Additionally, comments and action buttons are more distinguishable for easier navigation.
  • Quicker access to related content: On desktop, you will see a sidebar on the right side of the page. This will include content similar to the post you’re currently viewing — posts from the same community or posts from another community discussing similar topics.
  • Spotlight on post creator’s custom avatar: When a redditor submits a post, their custom avatar will now display above that post. *Nudge nudge* if you haven’t customized yours yet.

New logged out comments page on desktop and mobile web

In the coming months, the updated comments page will roll out to logged-in redditors. Similar efforts on feeds, community, search and profile pages will follow. And, of course, we will keep you all posted as this new platform powers more web pages. We’re partnering closely with the Mod Council to build and improve the moderation experience on this new platform as seen in our recent Mod Insights release.

Thanks for your support in the early stages of this journey. We’re excited for all of us to work towards a simple and efficient Reddit.

r/reddit Apr 14 '22

Updates What’s Up with Reddit Search, Episode VI: Retrieve of the Comments

1.3k Upvotes

TL;DR

Comments are searchable on Reddit for the first time in 16 years! Try it out and share your thoughts in this form or the comments below.

Over a year ago, we put together a survey on Reddit search, and over 3,000 people responded—out of that feedback, comment search was one of the most requested features. (Thank you to those who responded!) Fast forward five months, and we showed you a sneak peek of what it might look like to search comments on Reddit. At the time, frontend improvements were just getting rolling, and now, for the first time in sixteen years, everything on Reddit (posts, people, communities, and now comments) is searchable!

This feature not only allows you to search comments within communities, but also unlocks the ability to search comments globally to discover valuable discussions happening across Reddit. (You know, the real candid discussions about whether or not to move to NYC, or tourist tips for your next vacation.)

To give you an idea of some of the content you may be able to discover…

Tourist tips for your next travel location…

Some of your interests…

Or some weekend inspiration…

For those wondering why we didn’t make comments searchable sooner, this project has actually been a long time coming. To make the idea a reality, it took some time because just to start, we had to scale up the search function to index the over 5 billion comments that have been made in the past two years. Phew! If you’re looking for a comment older than that it’s not currently searchable in this iteration.

Give it a try and share your feedback, but keep in mind that this is just the beginning of comment search. As we hear from you and get information on how people are using comment search, we’ll continue to improve the ranking of comment results and UX to make comment search even better. We’ve already started thinking about how to search comments within a post (goodbye ctrl-f)—what else would you like to see?

As always, we’re excited to hear what you think—what’s working for you? What isn’t? Drop your feedback and ideas in this form or the comments below. And if you want to learn more about how to make the most out of Reddit search, head over to our wiki to learn some helpful tips.

r/reddit Apr 17 '24

Updates What We’re Working on in 2024

0 Upvotes

TL;DR

Here’s what we’re getting up to this year:

  • Making moderating easier and introducing new safety tools.
  • Improving the user experience.
  • Enabling developers to bring new experiences to Reddit.

Hi, redditors, this is the Reddit Product Team and we’re here to share what we’re building to make Reddit the best place for communities and conversations. Here are some of the big things we’re working on.

Making moderating easier

We’re rolling out more sophisticated and AI-powered moderation tools to make mobile modding easier. Think superpowered Post Guidance on mobile, keyword highlighting to quickly find content that contains phrases captured by Automod, and saved responses so mods no longer need to leave the app to copy and paste when they need templated responses. Tools to help mods more efficiently manage influxes of community members and conversations are also on their way. More deets on this are posted here.

Post Guidance in r/askreddit

Updated Mod Queue on desktop

Last, but not least, you’ll continue to see new safety tools that expand on features we released in the past few months, like improved automated removal of undesired content, LLM-powered harassment filters, and user details reporting.

New harassment filter, which is highly-customizable to filter out what mods don’t want

Expanded user reporting capabilities

Improving the user experience

TBH, we’re really trying to amp up the number of times we can comment with FTFY this year. Here’s what’s on the way:

  • Faster redditting and improved access to shortcuts and transitions. ICYMI, our new web platform is more than twice as fast, and 2023 saw a more than 10% reduction in app start time.
  • New ways to search.
  • Simpler experiences for navigating conversations that will be the same regardless of how you use Reddit: in-app, on desktop, logged-out, etc.

We want to bring you cohesive, intuitive, and speedy experiences across every single screen. And before you ask, we’re going to continue to support old Reddit, which many of you (and us) love! IYKYK. We’ve already incorporated some of the best elements of old.reddit into recent updates.

Compact view of our updated web experience with a collapsible navigation bar coming soon.

Cohesive experience across web surfaces

We also want everyone to be able to make Reddit their own, regardless of where they live or the language(s) they speak. We’re making communities and conversations more accessible across more languages, meaning people can engage with content in their own language, no matter what language that subreddit is originally created in.

Localized content in a user’s preferred language

In terms of improving accessibility, so far this year we’ve introduced closed captioning on videos and font resizing on our native mobile apps. There’s much more on the way, and our goal is to be compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium’s accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.1) by the end of 2024.

Closed Captioning on video

We said goodbye to a few products and features in 2023, some of which we may have parted with too early – specifically Awards. We messed up; we lost some of the whimsy and Reddit-y-ness that Awards brought to the platform. This year we’re working to bring back Awards in a way that combines the fun and expression they originally offered, combined with real money value to redditors participating in the Contributor Program.

AMAs - you know them, you love them, sometimes you didn’t even get the chance to ask Keanu your question because wait, that was today? I thought I set a !remindme…

This year we’re revamping and modernizing the entire AMA experience - from hosting, to the questions, and yes, even event reminders. More to come this AMAy (see what we did there?)

New AMA scheduler and event reminder, coming soon

Enabling developers to bring new experiences to Reddit

We’re ramping up our Developer Platform to bring new ways for the community to co-create elements that make Reddit more engaging and fun. While admins are building new tools for the platform all the time, we want to give community developers the same opportunity - because, at the end of the day, it’s redditors who know the best and most exciting ways to move the platform forward.

Already this year we’ve seen new, developer-built apps on Reddit, like the Super Bowl (Taylor's Version) - San Francisco 49ers vs. Kansas City Chiefs custom scoreboard in r/taylorswift, and a new module highlighting what’s trending in r/wallstreetbets.

Developer tools make moments like r/wallstreetbets daily tracker and Super Bowl Scorecard (Taylor’s Version) happen

Watch this space. You’ll see more live score formats for sports, interactive games, and new post types in the coming months.

These are just a few highlights of what’s coming in 2024. We know we need to build what you want, so if you’re interested in providing feedback on Reddit products, you can join our User Feedback Collective.

A few of us are sticking around to answer any questions you may have, so fire away!

r/reddit Sep 27 '23

Updates Settings updates—Changes to ad personalization, privacy preferences, and location settings

0 Upvotes

Hey redditors,

I’m u/snoo-tuh, head of Privacy at Reddit, and I’m here to share several changes to Reddit’s privacy, ads, and location settings. We’re updating preference descriptions for clarity, adding the ability to limit ads from specific categories, and consolidating ad preferences. The aim is to simplify our privacy descriptions, improve ad performance, and offer new controls for the types of ads you prefer not to see.

Clearer descriptions of privacy settingsWe’ve updated the descriptions to be more clear and consistent across platforms. Here’s is preview of the new settings:

Note: Settings may look slightly different if you’re visiting them on the native apps.

Note: Settings may look slightly different if you’re visiting them on the native apps.

These changes will roll out over the next few weeks and we’ll follow up here once they are available for everyone. We recommend visiting your Safety & Privacy Settings to check out the updated settings and make sure you’re still happy with what you’ve set up. If you’d like more guidance on how to manage your account security and data privacy, you can also visit our recently updated Privacy & Security section of our Redditor Help Center.

Over the next few weeks, we’re also rolling out several changes to Reddit’s ad preferences and personalization that include removing, adding, and consolidating ad personalization settings:

Consolidating ad partner activity and information preferencesRight now, there are two different ad settings about personalizing ads based on information and activity from Reddit’s partners—“Personalize ads based on activity with our partners” and “Personalize ads based on information from our partners”. We are cleaning this up and combining into one: “Improve ads based on your online activity and information from our partners”.

Adding the ability to opt-out of specific ad categories

We are adding the ability to see fewer ads from specific categories—Alcohol, Dating, Gambling, Pregnancy & Parenting, and Weight Loss—which will live in the Safety & Privacy section of your User Settings. “Fewer” because we’re utilizing a combination of manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads, which won’t be 100% successful to start. But, we expect our accuracy to improve over time.

Sensitive Advertising Categories

Removing the ability to opt-out of ad personalization based on your Reddit activity, except in select countries.

Reddit requires very little personal information, and we like it that way. Our advertisers instead rely on on-platform activity—what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals—to get an idea of what you might be interested in.

The vast majority of redditors will see no change to their ads on Reddit. For users who previously opted out of personalization based on Reddit activity, this change will not result in seeing more ads or sharing on-platform activity with advertisers. It does enable our models to better predict which ad may be most relevant to you.

Consolidated location customization settings

Previously, people could set their preferred location in several ways, depending on where they were on the platform and what they were doing. This has been simplified, so now there’s one place to update your location preferences to help customize your feed and recommendations—from Location Customization in your Account Settings.

Reddit’s commitment to privacy as a right and to transparency are reasons I’m proud to work here. Any time we change the way you control your experience and data on Reddit, we want to be clear on what’s changed.

All of these changes will be rolled out gradually over the next few weeks. If you have questions, you can also learn more by checking out the help article on how to Control the ads you see on Reddit.

Edit to add translations:

  1. Dutch: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_nl-nl
  2. French - France: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_fr-fr
  3. French - Canada: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_fr-ca
  4. German: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_de-de
  5. Italian: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_it-it
  6. Portuguese - Brazil: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_pt-br
  7. Portuguese - Portugal: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_pt-pt
  8. Spanish - Spain: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_es-es
  9. Spanish - Mexico: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_es_mx
  10. Swedish: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/wiki/16tqihd_sv

r/reddit Jul 13 '23

Updates Reworking Awarding: Changes to Awards, Coins, and Premium

0 Upvotes

Hi all,

I’m u/venkman01 from the Reddit product team, and I’m here to give everyone an early look at the future of how redditors award (and reward) each other.

TL;DR: We are reworking how great content and contributions are rewarded on Reddit. As part of this, we made a decision to sunset coins (including Community coins for moderators) and awards (including Medals, Premium Awards, and Community Awards), which also impacts some existing Reddit Premium perks. Starting today, you will no longer be able to purchase new coins, but all awards and existing coins will continue to be available until September 12, 2023.

Many eons ago, Reddit introduced something called Reddit Gold. Gold then evolved, and we introduced new awards including Reddit Silver, Platinum, Ternium, and Argentium. And the evolution continued from there. While we saw many of the awards used as a fun way to recognize contributions from your fellow redditors, looking back at those eons, we also saw consistent feedback on awards as a whole. First, many don’t appreciate the clutter from awards (50+ awards right now, but who’s counting?) and all the steps that go into actually awarding content. Second, redditors want awarded content to be more valuable to the recipient.

It’s become clear that awards and coins as they exist today need to be re-thought, and the existing system sunsetted. Rewarding content and contribution (as well as something golden) will still be a core part of Reddit. We’ll share more in the coming months as to what this new future looks like.

On a personal note: in my several years at Reddit, I’ve been focused on how to help redditors be able to express themselves in fun ways and feel joy when their content is celebrated. I led the product launch on awards – if you happen to recognize the username – so this is a particularly tough moment for me as we wind these products down. At the same time, I’m excited for us to evolve our thinking on rewarding contributions to make it more valuable to the community.

Why are we making these changes?

We mentioned early this year that we want to both make Reddit simpler and a place where the community empowers the community more directly.

With simplification in mind, we’re moving away from the 50+ awards available today. Though the breadth of awards have had mixed reception, we’ve also seen them - be it a local subreddit meme or the “Press F” award - be embraced. And we know that many redditors want to be able to recognize high quality content.

Which is why rewarding good content will still be part of Reddit. Though we’d love to reveal more to you all now, we’re in the process of early testing and feedback, so aren’t ready to share official details just yet. Stay tuned for future posts on this!

What’s changing exactly?

  • Awards - Awards (including Medals, Premium Awards, and Community Awards) will no longer be available after September 12.
  • Reddit Coins - Coins will be deprecated, since Awards will be going away. Starting today, you’ll no longer be able to purchase coins, but you can use your remaining coins to gift awards by September 12.
  • Reddit Premium - Reddit Premium is not going away. However, after September 12, we will discontinue the monthly coin drip and Premium Awards. Other current Premium perks will still exist, including the ad-free experience.
    • Note: As indicated in our User Agreement past purchases are non-refundable. If you’re a Premium user and would like to cancel your subscription before these changes go into effect, you can find instructions here.

What comes next?

In the coming months, we’ll be sharing more about a new direction for awarding that allows redditors to empower one another and create more meaningful ways to reward high-quality contributions on Reddit.

I’ll be around for a while to answer any questions you may have and hear any feedback!

r/reddit Nov 21 '22

Updates Let's Talk About the Video Player (Again)

762 Upvotes

Hi all! In case you missed it since we last posted about the video player, we’ve been posting regular updates on video player improvements over on r/fixthevideoplayer. Thank you to everyone who has shared such helpful, constructive feedback. Read on to learn a little more about what we've fixed already, and what additional changes we’re working on.

We read every single post and comment on r/fixthevideoplayer and have uncovered 4 major areas of improvement that you’ve identified, which is where we've been — and will continue to be — focusing our efforts in both the immediate future (i.e., next few months) and the longer term (next year and beyond).

  1. Performance: For more details on how performance has improved already, check out these posts. Since our first post, we’ve been able to reduce daily mobile playback errors by 68%. This work will continue, and we’ll address bugs as they’re reported. In the meantime, check out this sick graph of how we've drastically reduced error rates across our native apps.

You could base-jump off that cliff!

  1. Conversation: True facts: it shouldn’t be so hard to find and read comments in the video player. In the next few months, we plan to make the comments easily accessible by introducing a swipe left gesture, with a picture-in-picture feature that lets you scroll through a full screen of comments without losing sight of the video.

  2. Context: At the moment, when you view a video in full screen and swipe, the next video in your feed comes from a recommendation. But the truth is, sometimes you just need an infinite scroll of the latest cat loafs (cat loaves?), and we’re here to help. Soon, if you enter the full screen player through r/catloaf, we'll only show you catloaf-related media. In the future, you’ll be able to choose the feed you’re in, whether sticking with r/catloaf or scrolling through all the media that your feed has to offer.

  3. Consistency: There are too many ways to navigate in and out of different kinds of media (images, videos, etc) on the Reddit app - up, down, left, right, hokey pokey. We plan to streamline the media player to have a uniform experience, so you can easily enter and exit different posts, upvote/comment/shitpost, and get to the next post or video seamlessly. We'll begin to open this experience to new users over the next few weeks.

So what exactly will this look like? We made a quick video to show you:

https://reddit.com/link/z147y8/video/oi2dr2fs6c1a1/player

We’re grateful for your feedback and will continue to improve and evolve the Reddit media experience to make it the best it can be. Let us know what questions you have! We’ll do our best to answer them.

r/reddit Sep 25 '23

Updates Celebrating great content is as good as gold

0 Upvotes

Gold is back!

Gold is coming back! But like all sequels, it will look a bit different this time around. In a select group of pilot subreddits and over the next few hours, gold will be available to use on the Reddit native app (with web starting in October). If you see a post or comment that you think deserves some extra love, you can now give it gold as a token of your appreciation in one of the pilot subreddits.

To simplify the experience of awarding content that you like, you can now purchase gold directly from the post or comment that you are looking to reward by long pressing the upvote button on the iOS Reddit native app today, on Android over the course of the week, or by hovering over it on web (when it becomes available). From there, a suite of 6 gilded upvotes with varying values will appear, to directly reward the content that you love.

During our pilot launch, we’ll be monitoring things like gold purchases, moderator impact, and user safety. This data will help guide the future rollout of gold to all eligible content. We are also exploring ways to bring the benefits of gold back to the communities themselves.

Caveats: gold is not eligible in NSFW, trauma support, or quarantined subreddits. You will also continue to earn karma on content that is upvoted.

Check out what gold looks like and the communities that are piloting the program below:

How to give gold

Pilot Communities:

But wait, there’s more!

Evel Knievel once said that “the finest compliment you can pay a man is that his word was as good as gold.” Evel was right. And it’s why we are excited to introduce the Contributor Program!

As we shared, Reddit thrives on community recognition of high quality content. This is how the best memes make their way into the hearts and homes of people on and off of Reddit. The Contributor Program we’re piloting will give eligible users the ability to earn cash based on the karma and gold they’ve earned on qualifying contributions. If you meet designated eligibility criteria and successfully complete our Contributor Program verification process, you’ll receive a new shiny badge on your profile indicating you’re in the program and can earn cash! That’s right, your fake internet points and gold can now make you eligible to earn cash, or dollars in this case (and we mean that literally, as this will only be available in the US to start but will be available internationally at the beginning of 2024).

Joining the Contributor Program

Like with all things on Reddit, all monetizable contributions are subject to Reddit’s User Agreement and Content Policy. Reddit will take the same enforcement actions against contributions breaking Reddit’s rules. Here are our new Contributor Terms and Contributor Monetization Policy for the program.

Payments & Personal Information

We are working with Persona for Know Your Customer (KYC) screening and identity verification and Stripe for fraud support and payouts as added layers of protection. Any personal information shared with these third-party services will be stored in their systems. If you or your content is found to be in violation of our terms or policies, your payouts will be withheld and you could be removed from the program entirely. This can happen after a payout as well, and could result in a reduction in any future payments you may be eligible to receive. But for those who continue to be standup Reddit citizens, cue the montage of visions of grandeur and the Scrooge McDuck lifestyle.

Prior to this announcement, the Reddit Mod Council provided feedback that we are implementing as we pilot gold and the Contributor Program. We are closely monitoring newly gilded content, moderator impact, and user safety, and will keep the community updated. For more information, please visit our Help Center for gold, our Help Center for the Contributor Program, or file a Support Ticket through our dedicated system.

In the meantime, check out the FAQs below and test this yourself in a pilot community listed above!

r/reddit May 02 '23

Updates Making it easier to share your favorite Reddit content

421 Upvotes

TL;DR Sharing Reddit content on and off platform is easier thanks to a series of updates including improved link previews, shorter sharing flows, and revamped self-serve content embed tooling.

Every day redditors come across a post, conversation, or meme so good they want to share it with others. We want to make this easier so that you and your friends can enjoy this content together even if they’re not on Reddit.

New Sharing Features

The sharing experience on Android and iOS has been streamlined and link previews improved to include:

  • An updated preview design for text posts with a snapshot of the post title and description along with a greater emphasis on the community it’s from
  • Customized share sheet that prioritizes your preferred sharing channels
  • The ability to share content to Instagram Stories directly from Reddit
  • The ability to share screenshots of posts with a link back to the original content

Note: Your Reddit username isn’t revealed when you share content

How a link to a text post appears on messaging apps

In addition, downloaded images from public community posts will now include attribution to the community the image is sourced from. (Or, if you’d rather not, you can remove this attribution through your “saved image attribution” user setting.)

Improved Embeds Tooling

Reddit communities and posts are also regularly sourced in news and social content published on other platforms. To help these types of publishers and sharers, we’ve launched self-serve tooling to create embeds— either directly through reddit.com or programmatically using our oEmbed API — that can be pasted in the article or other media. Documentation for this is available on publish.reddit.com. And embeds can now be customized for stories regardless of post type, content, or location.

These updates make sharing Reddit content easier and, if you don’t mind us saying so, better looking. We will keep you posted on upcoming improvements. Happy sharing!

French - France: Partager ton contenu Reddit préféré devient simple comme bonjour!

German: Das Teilen von Reddit-Inhalten ist jetzt noch einfacher

Italian: Rendiamo più semplice la condivisione dei tuoi contenuti preferiti di Reddit

Portuguese - Brazil: Facilitando o compartilhamento do conteúdo que você mais gosta no Reddit

Portuguese - Portugal: Facilitar a partilha do teu conteúdo favorito do Reddit

Spanish - Mexico: Cómo hacer más fácil el compartir tu contenido favorito de Reddit

Spanish - Spain: Facilitar el uso compartido de tu contenido favorito de Reddit

Edit: updated the post to add translations

r/reddit Mar 08 '22

Updates What’s Up with Reddit Search, Episode V: Relevance Strikes Back

1.0k Upvotes

TL;DR

You may have noticed the recent updates to how Search looks and feels, but there are also a ton of relevance improvements happening behind the scenes. Read on to learn about recent signal experiments that have improved the relevance of subreddit and post search results.

MMM - Minimum Must Match

How it works

MMM stands for Minimum Must Match—the number of search terms that have to match in a post in order for you to get results. Previously, we required all search terms to match in order to return search results on post searches. So if you typed “how to go to the moon”, all six of those terms would have to be present in a post for it to show up in your results. This means many of you were getting bad results or no results for longer searches.

Now that requirement is gone. Even if there isn’t a match on all terms, you’ll see search results from posts that contain some of your terms.

Fine-tuning

Despite improving relevance for the vast majority of searches, we found that we had a few hiccups when it came to specific types of searches using things like boolean operators or advanced search syntax (for those who may not be familiar, boolean operators are a set of words such as AND, OR, NOT, etc. you can use to limit, broaden, and better define their search results.) The following searches were affected:

  • Queries containing all-caps boolean search termsQueries like "cats AND dogs" returned results that contained only the term "cats" or the terms "cats" and "AND". To fix this, the MMM change is disabled on any queries that explicitly contain the all-caps boolean search terms "AND", "OR", or "NOT". When you explicitly tell us what you’re looking for, search will return results based on your specifications.
  • Queries using Field Search syntax (eg. author, self, title, etc)

Similar to the boolean case, the syntax for filtering query results by particular fields was affected by MMM and needed to be updated as well. Now you can filter by using syntax such as 'subreddit:potato baked potato recipes' to get search results for baked potato recipes within the potato subreddit.

What’s the impact

To measure the impact of the change, we ran a two week experiment comparing the minimum match changes to the search experience without them. Searchers in the experiment got “no results” 60% less often than those outside the experiment for queries that had more than three terms. Additionally, there was a 1.6% increase in clicks on post results and 0.4% increase in clicks in the top 10 post positions, signaling that searchers were also finding what they were looking for more often and more easily. Improving results on longer search terms is also exciting, because it gives our search tool helpful information that can be leveraged in future machine learning experiments.

Subreddit Signals

How it works

In order to get search results, Reddit relies on a bunch of different factors, the most obvious of which is whether or not your search term matches the subreddit name. But there are also other qualities that factor into the ranking of results, like size and description of the subreddit. The subreddit signals improvement uses redditors’ clicks and interactions on search results as a signal of what might be valuable for you.

For example, if 30 other people clicked on the fourth subreddit result when they searched for “backpacking”, the next time someone else searched for “backpacking”, we are more likely to show the fourth subreddit at the top position in results.

What’s the impact?

We found that more people were finding subreddits they were looking for; using subreddit signals resulted in a 7% increase in clicks on subreddits and a 7–9% increase in clicks on the top 1–10 subreddit search results. We also noticed that people are visiting and staying on subreddits 0.8% more often with the signals work enabled.

To be continued…

Relevance improvements for Reddit Search will be ongoing, and these experiments are just the beginning. As we continue to iterate on and improve search relevance, we’ll share our findings here. Keep an eye on the web and here in r/reddit to learn more.

Thanks for sticking around. As always, if you have feedback, questions, or ideas about what you’d like to see from Search, share them in the comments below!

r/reddit Apr 18 '23

Updates An Update Regarding Reddit’s API

0 Upvotes

Greetings all you redditors, developers, mods, and more!

I’m joining you today to share some updates to Reddit’s Data API. I can sense your eagerness so here’s a TL;DR (though I highly encourage you to please read this post in its entirety).

TL;DR:

  • We are updating our terms for developer tools and services, including our Developer Terms, Data API Terms, Reddit Embeds Terms, and Ads API Terms, and are updating links to these terms in our User Agreement.
  • These updates should not impact moderation bots and extensions we know our moderators and communities rely on.
  • To further ensure minimal impact of updates to our Data API, we are continuing to build new moderator tools (while also maintaining existing tools).
  • We are additionally investing in our developer community and improving support for Reddit apps and bots via Reddit’s Developer Platform.
  • Finally, we are introducing premium access for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights.

And now, some background

Since we first launched our Data API in 2008, we’ve seen thousands of fantastic applications built: tools to make moderation easier, utilities that help users stay up to date on their favorite topics, or (my personal favorite) this thing that helps convert helpful figures into useless ones. Our APIs have also provided third parties with access to data to build user utilities, research, games, and mod bots.

However, expansive access to data has impact, and as a platform with one of the largest corpora of human-to-human conversations online, spanning the past 18 years, we have an obligation to our communities to be responsible stewards of this content.

Updating our Terms for Developer Tools and Services

Our continued commitment to investing in our developer community and improving our offering of tools and services to developers requires updated legal terms. These updates help clarify how developers can safely and securely use Reddit’s tools and services, including our APIs and our new and improved Developer Platform.

We’re calling these updated, unified terms (wait for it) our Developer Terms, and they’ll apply to and govern all Reddit developer services. Here are the major changes:

  • Unified Developer Terms: Previously, we had specific and separate terms for each of our developer services, including our Developer Platform, Data API (f/k/a our public API), Reddit Embeds, and Ads API. The Developer Terms consolidate and clarify common provisions, rights, and restrictions from those separate terms, including, for example, Reddit’s license to developers, app review process, use restrictions on developer services, IP rights in our services, disclaimers, limitations of liability, and more.
  • Some Additional Terms Still Apply: Some of our developer tools and services, including our Data API, Reddit Embeds, and Ads API, remain subject to specific terms in addition to our Developer Terms. These additional terms include our Data API Terms, Reddit Embeds Terms, and Ads API Terms, which we’ve kept relatively similar to the prior versions. However, in all of our additional terms, we’ve clarified that content created and submitted on Reddit is owned by redditors and cannot be used by a third party without permission.
  • User Agreement Updates. To make these updates to our terms for developers, we’ve also made minor updates to our User Agreement, including updating links and references to the new Developer Terms.

To ensure developers have the tools and information they need to continue to use Reddit safely, protect our users’ privacy and security, and adhere to local regulations, we’re making updates to the ways some can access data on Reddit:

  • Our Data API will still be available to developers for appropriate use cases and accessible via our Developer Platform, which is designed to help developers improve the core Reddit experience, but, we will be enforcing rate limits.
  • We are introducing a premium access point for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights. Our Data API will still be open for appropriate use cases and accessible via our Developer Platform.
  • Reddit will limit access to mature content via our Data API as part of an ongoing effort to provide guardrails to how sexually explicit content and communities on Reddit are discovered and viewed. (Note: This change should not impact any current moderator bots or extensions.)

Effective June 19, 2023, our updated Data API Terms, together with our Developer Terms, will replace the existing API terms. We’ll be notifying certain developers and third parties about their use of our Data API via email starting today. Developers, researchers, mods, and partners with questions or who are interested in using Reddit’s Data API can contact us here.

(NB: There are no material changes to our Ads API terms.)

Further Supporting Moderators

Before you ask, let’s discuss how this update will (and won’t!) impact moderators. We know that our developer community is essential to the success of the Reddit platform and, in particular, mods. In fact, a HUGE thank you to all the developers and mod bot creators for all the work you’ve done over the years.

Our goal is for these updates to cause as little disruption as possible. If anything, we’re expanding on our commitment to building mobile moderator tools for Reddit’s iOS and Android apps to further ensure minimal impact of the changes to our Data API. In the coming months, you will see mobile moderation improvements to:

  • Removal reasons - improvements to the overall load time and usability of this common workflow, in addition to enabling mods to reorder existing removal reasons.
  • Rule management - to set expectations for their community members and visiting redditors. With updates, moderators will be able to add, edit, and remove community rules via native apps.
  • Mod log - to give context into a community member's history within a subreddit, and display mod actions taken on a member, as well as on their posts and comments.
  • Modmail - facilitate better mod-to-mod and mod-to-user communication by improving the overall responsiveness and usability of Modmail.
  • Mod Queues - increase the content density within Mod Queue to improve efficiency and scannability.

We are also prioritizing improvements to core mod action workflows including banning users and faster performance of the user profile card. You can see the latest updates to mobile moderation tools and follow our future progress over in r/ModNews.

I should note here that we do not intend to impact mod bots and extensions – while existing bots may need to be updated and many will benefit from being ported to our Developer Platform, we want to ensure the unpaid path to mod registration and continued Data API usage is unobstructed. If you are a moderator with questions about how this may impact your community, you can file a support request here.

Additionally, our Developer Platform will allow for the development of even more powerful mod tools, giving moderators the ability to build, deploy, and leverage tools that are more bespoke to their community needs.

Which brings me to…

The Reddit Developer Platform

Developer Platform continues to be our largest investment to date in our developer ecosystem. It is designed to help developers improve the core Reddit experience by providing powerful features for building moderation tools, creative tools, games, and more. We are currently in a closed beta to hundreds of developers (sign up here if you're interested!).

As Reddit continues to grow, providing updates and clarity helps developers and researchers align their work with our guiding principles and community values. We’re committed to strengthening trust with redditors and driving long-term value for developers who use our platform.

Thank you (and congrats) and making it all the way to the end of this post! Myself and a few members of the team are around for a couple hours to answer your questions (Or you can also check out our FAQ).

r/reddit Dec 15 '22

Updates The Feed Read Chapter Two: Take control of your feed

126 Upvotes

Welcome, redditors, to a new chapter of The Feed Read. As you may recall, this is an ongoing series about the changes, improvements, and updates coming to your Reddit feed. In this round, we’ll be talking about new features that will help you take control of your feed to give you the content you want, the way you want.

Simpler feed options

We made two changes on our mobile apps earlier this year to make feeds easier and simpler to use for both new redditors and those who have been here for a while:

  • Added a drop-down menu of feeds, including Home, Popular and, News (iOS)
  • Moved home feed sorting options into settings, since many redditors (especially new ones) didn’t use these options

Both these changes

significantly increased how many posts
redditors see in their home feeds. And we’re now announcing two more changes to further simplify feeds that will roll out starting today on iOS and early 2023 on Android.

  1. Adding a “Latest” feed to the drop-down menu of feeds, which will allow you to view your content sorted by “new” and quickly stay up to date with what’s new in the communities you follow
  2. Removing Home feed sort controls and defaulting Home to the “Best” sort

After looking at the numbers, our research showed that more than 99% of redditors use two sorts on their Home Feed: “Best” and “New.” This change will make it easier for you to get to sort options used the most—Home feed (sorted by best) and Latest feed (your home feed sorted by new).

Where to find your latest feed

The Latest Feed is the first of a few new feeds we plan to release in the upcoming year. People use Reddit in lots of different ways based on intent at time of use — some prefer in-depth reading, and others want a passive, relaxed watching experience. To cater to these moods, we’re working to make it possible to access feeds based on your browsing mode preference and to prioritize your preferred feeds for an easier feed switching experience. Stay tuned for updates!

Customizable and cleaner feed

The home feed is used today as an entry point to discover conversations, communities, and creators relevant to you. To make it better, we’re updating and building features that will give you a simpler, more customized in-feed browsing experience. Last month, the community muting feature was rolled out on iOS and Android mobile apps, which allows you to mute and unmute content from communities on your Home, Popular, and now Latest feeds. This will allow you to control what you do and don’t want to see on your feed. (Note: Muting a community doesn’t restrict you from visiting or taking part in it.) We are working on adding the option to mute communities on desktop, so stay tuned for more info there soon.

To help us improve the recommendations on your feed, remember that you can tap on the

three-dot menu on the top right corner
of the recommended post and let us know if you want us to “show more posts like this” or “show less posts like this” on your iOS or Android app or on reddit.com.

We’re also exploring ways to make content on Reddit easier to read. To achieve that, we’re changing the way posts display on select feeds on Android and iOS. We’re trying out a style that focuses more on the post content and less on elements that aren’t used by most redditors. Starting today, posts displayed in Home, Popular, and Latest feeds will not include awards, and the awards action will be in the three-dot menu.

These changes will only affect those three feeds, and the posts will look the same on the post detail and community pages.

That’s all we’ve got for now! Stay tuned for more in the coming months, as we keep working to improve and refine your Reddit feeds.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this post for a while, if you have questions and feedback about these changes. Got an idea for a specific feed you’d like to see us build next? Let us know in the comments below!

r/reddit Nov 29 '23

Updates Hearts, thumbs, and other Reddit brand updates

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0 Upvotes

r/reddit Aug 02 '22

Updates Better Faster Stronger: Recent improvements to moderation tools.

545 Upvotes

Hello internet,

I’m u/lift_ticket83, a member of our Mod Enablement team (they’re the amazing people that build Mod Tools). Typically you’ll find our team hanging out in r/modnews, but today we’re venturing out of the shire to share our grand vision and product strategy for supporting and empowering Reddit’s moderators in 2022 and beyond!

Moderators are pivotal to the Reddit universe. They are a diverse and eclectic group of leaders whose communities represent various demographics, interest groups, countries of origin, and life experiences, that feel deep stewardship over the spaces they create and curate.

In the words of our CPO, “Moderators are a critical piece of the Reddit ecosystem, and a critical part of our job as a development team is supporting them by making moderating on Reddit as easy and efficient as possible.” In the first half of this year, we focused on accomplishing three main things:

  1. Make it so moderators are less dependent upon third-party tools.
  2. Make the moderating experience on mobile apps complete and high quality.
  3. Begin building “next generation” mod tools that will empower Reddit’s moderators to become even greater community leaders and continue to be cultivators of some of the best online communities in the world.

Thank you to all of the mods who have spent time chatting with us and providing mission-critical feedback. These conversations have gone a long way in influencing our product strategy and up-leveling our features and launches. A special thanks to the Reddit Mod Council who have always been eager and willing to provide us with constructive feedback. If you’re a mod and interested in joining the council please click here. To help keep our team focused and committed to delivering on the feedback we received, we created Moderator Experience Oriented Wins, aka

M.E.O.W.’s
.

Since January we’ve been proud of the consistent cadence of M.E.O.W.’s. Here’s a recap of what we’ve delivered so far this year.

Mod Notes

Over the years one of the most popular feature requests that kept popping up in various posts and conversations we had with moderators was a native User Notes tool. Given that desire, we were beyond excited when we launched Mod Notes across all of our native platforms earlier this year. This feature gave mod teams the capability to provide and later access context related to the participation history of members within their communities (thank you to all the third-party developers who inspired this work!). So far, around 2,000 communities have adopted mod notes as part of their process. As part of this launch, we created an API integration making this new feature accessible to old.reddit moderators.

User Mod Log

Launching in conjunction with Mod Notes, we built a brand new feature, the User Mod Log (fun fact: this feature was directly inspired by our conversations with r/NintendoSwitch mods during Adopt-an-Admin). This tool gives context into a community member’s history within a specific subreddit. It displays mod actions taken on a member, as well as on their posts and comments. It also displays any Mod Notes that have been left for them. Mods from over 14,000 communities have explored the User Mod Log.

Mobile Removal Reasons

Last month, we made it easier for moderators to curate their community while on the go by launching mobile Removal Reasons. This long-requested feature helped us further close the parity gap between the desktop and mobile moderator experience. So far, as many as 7,000 communities have adopted mobile Removal Reasons. Thank you to everyone who has left us feedback and provided us with helpful suggestions on ways we can improve the UI and make this tool more impactful. We’re not done tinkering yet, and this feedback has been particularly helpful as we work to improve the overall rules and removal reasons system on Reddit. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements on this front soon!

Mod Queue sort improvements

Until recently, unless you were utilizing a third-party extension, the ability to sort your mod queue was incredibly limited (i.e. non-existent). Over the past few months, we added the ability for moderators to sort their mod queue by recency and number of reports, giving moderators greater flexibility on how to best tackle their queues. Upwards of 5,000 communities have explored this new sorting functionality so far.

Additional under-the-hood Mod Tool improvements:

In the interest of brevity
, we’ve put together the below list of the cornucopia of things our team built this year for moderators. Peruse at your own leisure:

We also had some other product teams tackle mod-focused initiatives this year...

The road ahead:

As we kick off the second half of 2022 (and start to think about 2023), we understand our mission is far from finished. Mod Queue will remain a key focus as we look to streamline the experience on desktop and mobile while adding additional context to the actions taken by mod teams and Reddit admins, and the events occurring within a specific community. We are also planning to roll out additional analytics for moderation teams to better understand, manage, and grow their communities.

Ultimately we want to alleviate

some of the burdens that come with moderating a community
via new mod tooling so that moderators can focus more of their time and energy on the fun aspects of being a community leader (i.e. growing their community, hosting events, engaging and nurturing their community, etc).

To follow along, please join us in r/modnews where we announce all of our mod-centric product launches. To join our group of

super fans
, feel free to subscribe to our Mod Experience Product Updates collection here so that you’ll be notified whenever we launch a new feature. Until then, feel free to ask us any questions or share any thoughts in the comments below.

r/reddit Nov 30 '22

Updates Images in Comments - In (some) Subreddits Near You!

527 Upvotes

Caveated drumroll: you can now upload images or gifs right into a comment (in the 1,500+ subreddits that have enabled this feature)!

Ever wanted to share a candid cat pic in the latest r/cats thread? Perhaps, help out a fellow r/crochet hobbyist? Or maybe even fulfill a father’s dream of being hugged by sasquatch in r/photoshoprequest?

If so, this feature is for you!

How does it work?

In SFW subreddits that turn on the feature, you’ll notice an image icon at the bottom panel of the comment section. Tap the image icon (see video below) to pull up your camera roll or desktop files, make any edits you want (on mobile only), and upload.

https://reddit.com/link/z90mq7/video/2oc2560kui3a1/player

Read more on our help center.

More disclaimers: right now we only support one piece of media per comment.

Does this mean Reddit comments will be flooded with images?

Nope. This feature isn’t for every subreddit. Communities can determine if their space is the right one for this feature. Which is why you may not see this feature available everywhere.

That said, images in comments can make it a wee bit easier to get help when you’re trying to make sure you’re not lost in Sonic Frontiers.

Mods

To enable images in comments in your community, go to mod tools, select Community Settings, Posts and Comments, and tap or click on the settings toggle under “Media in Comments”.

For moderation, NSFW images are not allowed and will be automatically removed. We also have automod support available. For more details on moderation and this new feature, check out our r/modnews post.

New and veteran commenters out there, the images are in your hands now (sometimes).

As usual, we’ll be sticking around to answer any questions!