The New Rules of Social: How Reddit Is Leading with a Human Touch | Fast Company

Hi Harry. Good morning. Hi everybody.

Yeah. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

I'll come back to the front page of the internet. What Reddit is, there's two audiences for whom I can answer that question. One would be externally. Reddit is communities. Reddit is many thousands of communities where people can talk about whatever their interests and passions are. Whatever you're into, whatever hobby, whatever show you're watching, whatever decision you're thinking about making, whatever you're going through, whatever medical malady you're facing, it's all on Reddit. Now, this question comes up internally a lot as well, because we'll be 21 years old this summer. And so we've seen a lot of change and a lot of change right now on the internet with AI. And so this more existential question comes up like what is Reddit? More practically, what can we change and what can we not change? So what I tell people internally, it's not that complicated. Things we will never touch: communities, voting, user empowerment. The users make the communities, the users write the rules, the users create the content, the users rank the content. We don't touch that stuff, but all the pixels and the layouts and the UI and all that stuff, go nuts.

It's been great. I actually really, really enjoy it. It was funny. We tried to go public in 2022. We thought at the time nobody was going public. And so we thought, okay, well, look, the market's a little chaotic, but Reddit's a little chaotic, so this is a perfect fit. Maybe we can be one of the first ones out and help reopen things. And then Russia invaded Ukraine. The economy took a further nose dive and so we delayed. It was two full years and then we were still one of the first ones out. And so it's a really quiet time, but honestly, I really enjoy it. I think the routine, the rigor, the pressure have all made us a better company. There's no doubt in my mind. That entire situation is just bringing out another level from us and I think just as the CEO I really appreciate that. And I also have this pet peeve of when people are so fortunate to have a company that they can take public then they spend the rest of their careers bitching about it. I just don't get that. It's such an honor and I feel so grateful that we made it this far. Never in my wildest dreams would we have made it this far. So I think it's great.

I think actually overall very well. Part of the reason we went public was so that our users who have created everything interesting about Reddit. As I was saying before, Reddit's fundamentally very simple. It's communities that we call subreddits. The users create the communities. They write the rules. They do the ranking. All these interesting emergent properties have come out because of our users. So they have this deep sense of ownership of Reddit. And we wanted that sense of ownership to be actual ownership. And so we were able to include thousands of users in the IPO. So at the IPO price alongside the institutional investors and they all did very well. So we did a mod meetup. We do about a dozen of these a year. So I met a bunch of moderators. Moderators are users who create communities on Reddit. So they're basically like super users. So, we did one of these meetups in Chicago last week and I met a bunch of users who were just like, 'Thank you for the IPO.' And I was like, 'Thank you for saying that.' That was the whole point. So I think we wanted to basically align incentives. Because as you said, the users don't really think of Reddit as a business. And now many of them do or at least they know kind of why we're doing what we're doing. And so there's just more cohesion there. So I think it's overall worked out really well.

No is the short answer. LLMs would not exist as we know them without Reddit. Reddit is one of the single largest sources of training data for the LLMs and Reddit continues to be one of the primary sources of both training data and we're also the most cited platform across all models per Perplexity. And so what we found ourselves in this position is where the content on Reddit has effectively become like oil. It's like modern oil. It's this foundational resource for the modern internet. And the reason for this is because there's no artificial intelligence without actual intelligence. At the end of the day, these models are quite simple. They're regurgitating on an absolutely massive scale what they've consumed elsewhere and a large portion of that consumption is actually just the human conversation on Reddit because it's natural and it covers basically every topic imaginable.

Well I think we are still pretty generous in addition to all of that which everything Harry mentioned is true. We've got deals with some, lawsuits with others. We still give our data away for free to researchers and universities for example. Historically, Reddit has been born of the open internet and Reddit has been open and very permissive for access to its data. And honestly, I think we would be in a different position today if the AI companies were still basically open and open source and doing open research. Because we take some pride in Reddit's data being used to advance the state-of-the-art and advance humanity and even before AI people do all sorts of interesting research on Reddit just about human behavior and behavior online and so we think generally the world is better when information is open and accessible. That's just a belief that we have. For better for worse we found ourselves in a position where people are using our data and we don't know what it was being used for. And so quite simply our policy is commercial use of our data requires commercial terms and non-commercial use we'll try to be flexible to the extent that we can. But we also have to protect our users. So our users' privacy, our users' identity. We don't want our data being taken and used to reverse engineer the identity of our users or to target ads on them or to replace or disintermediate Reddit. And so within those constraints we still try to be a supportive partner in this ecosystem. And so companies like Google and OpenAI where we had good relationships we can actually do a deal and put some guardrails on use and access to our data on behalf of our users but then collaborate on making products for the next generation of the internet and I think that part's very exciting. But not every company you mentioned a couple is willing to be a collaborative partner and so unfortunately we have to go the other way which is lawsuits. But we prefer to find harmony somewhere in the middle.