Why Reddit is the internet’s last great hope

“Welcome to the front page of the internet.”

Everyone who enters Reddit’s San Francisco headquarters is greeted by that phrase, emblazoned right above the front door in bold red lettering. It’s how the company has described itself for years. But cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman acknowledges that it no longer captures the sprawling, 19-year-old community site’s essence.

Likening Reddit to a newspaper’s front page was originally “an aspirational joke,” he tells me. “And then maybe it felt more true than not for a while.” That was the mid-aughts, when much of the action took place on the site’s homepage, a list of links from around the web submitted by users and ranked by interestingness via upvoting and downvoting. The results amounted to a snapshot of what the internet was obsessing about at any point in time.

Today, however, Reddit’s 82.7 million daily active users (“redditors”) are dispersed throughout more than 100,000 active forums (“subreddits”). Topics range widely: gaming, investing, shopping, teaching, voting, troubleshooting, baking, coding, dating, traveling, gambling, bird-watching, and much, much more. In addition to being a font of practical advice, the site—which gave us internet obsessions such as Grumpy Cat—remains an unparalleled meme factory. Currently, 159,000 people belong to a subreddit devoted to hating on Grandpa Joe, the character from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a surprisingly rich vein of conversation.

Reddit now offers each user a unique experience hyperfocused on their interests—the furthest thing possible from a one-size-fits-all front page. So is there a better way to describe what the site has become? “We often say, ‘The most human place on the internet,’” Huffman says.

That proposition is propelling stunning growth in both users and revenue. In June, visits to Reddit rose 42% year over year to 3.4 billion, according to Similarweb, making it the ninth-most-visited site in the U.S. and the 15th worldwide. Reddit itself says its daily active users were up 51% in the second quarter. Revenue hit $281.2 million in Q2, up 54% year over year; ad sales, its primary business, were up 41%, to $253.1 million.

Moreover, Reddit’s much-delayed initial public offering, which finally happened in March, has been a success, with its stock up 50% from its IPO price. After $575 million in losses in Q1, tied to IPO-related expenses, the company reported just $10 million in losses for Q2. Investors are optimistic that the company is on the cusp of a goal that was once widely regarded as unobtainable: turning its popularity into meaningful profits.

Back in 2017, when Huffman first stated the possibility that Reddit would eventually go public, he didn’t know that the market debut would coincide with one of the most disruptive moments in tech history: the arrival of generative artificial intelligence. Since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, the epochal chatbot has been joined by similar offerings from startups (Anthropic, Perplexity) and big companies (Microsoft, Google) alike, all providing instant answers to the sort of questions that were formerly the province of humans, such as the ones on Reddit. Some of these tools were undoubtedly trained on Reddit’s human-created data without the company’s authorization or involvement. But rather than let itself get rolled over by AI, Reddit has turned the inflection point to its own advantage, signing major data-licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, with more to come. Such alliances could become a tidy sideline for Reddit’s ad business: It is receiving $60 million a year from the Google deal, according to Reuters, while Loop Capital analyst Alan Gould estimates that licensing data to OpenAI could add $40 million to $50 million.

That Reddit is a rapidly growing public company helping to shape technology’s next era is all the more remarkable given how long it was dogged by skepticism that it could ever turn its community into a real business. Its users operated under identity-cloaking handles. Unpaid moderators called many of the shots when it came to overseeing their communities and showed no fealty to management. The weird, freewheeling atmosphere, brimming with anarchic in-jokes, put off even those marketers who claimed to cherish authenticity. And that was before you got to its free-speech absolutism, which tolerated subreddits devoted to hate and harassment.

This willful chaos reflected a vision of the democratized internet that Huffman and cofounder Alexis Ohanian catalyzed in 2005. That year, the freshly minted University of Virginia grads joined tech accelerator Y Combinator’s inaugural class of startups, which included another young founder named Sam Altman; he became one of the first members of the Reddit community and would later become a key investor and board member (more on that later). After just 16 months, media powerhouse Condé Nast acquired it for $10 million. When Huffman’s contract expired three years later, he quit and cofounded travel search site Hipmunk. He didn’t come back to Reddit as CEO until 2015, after Condé had spun the company out and two previous leaders had been overwhelmed by the challenge of running it.

Huffman’s new mandate was to complete the unfinished work of proving that Reddit could be something more than a wildly popular online hangout. As its cofounder, “he had the moral authority to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to take this community and build a business on top of it,’” says Sequoia partner Alfred Lin, who led the VC firm’s investment in Reddit in 2017. A crackdown on the most repulsive subreddits was already in progress; Huffman continued it, reducing Reddit’s reputation as a haven for trolls. Brands that once regarded the site as a no-go zone came around: “Advertisers now feel better about being there,” says Ian Schafer, an ad-industry veteran who cofounded a branded entertainment company with Issa Rae. Today, Reddit’s clients include the likes of Adidas and Samsung, and Reddit has struck deals with the NFL, NBA, MLB, and other leagues to share revenue from ads placed against sports clips posted on the site.

Just as important, Huffman has built out a robust management team. When Jen Wong, who’d worked at Time Inc., PopSugar, and AOL, joined as COO in 2018, Reddit barely generated revenue, which made her new task a leap of faith: “It doesn’t have a business model but is a pillar of the internet,” she remembers thinking.

More recent recruits include CFO Drew Vollero (Snapchat, Mattel, Taco Bell) and chief product officer Pali Bhat (a 10-year Google veteran). “The fact that those folks were willing to join Reddit tells you something about [Huffman] and what people saw in the potential of the platform,” says Lalit Gurnani, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, one of the IPO’s underwriters.

Now 40, Huffman has become a seasoned executive himself. When we meet in a conference room named after Wholesome Memes, a subreddit with 17 million members, he’s wearing horn-rimmed glasses that add a professorial counterweight to his still-boyish shock of blond hair. The early months of running a public company have been easier than the years spent preparing for that eventuality, he says: “This is one of those quotes that I’m going to hate in a year or two, but it’s been great.”

Still, with generative AI’s impact only beginning to be seen, he says “The game is far from over.” As the most human place on the internet, Reddit, its fate, and that of the entire web are intertwined—and Reddit will bear outsize responsibility for determining what happens next.

Even before ChatGPT and its AI rivals came along, the internet had gradually been losing its soul. Stalwarts of the handcrafted web, such as Tumblr and blogs, have been in decline for years. X has failed to stomp out misinformation spread by Russian bot farms. Facebook, having lost faith in the notion that updates from friends are enough to keep us clicking, now stuffs our feeds with algorithmically selected posts from groups we never asked to follow. TikTok has been an addiction machine all along.

All of which makes Reddit a striking throwback—“The last great text-based community site on the internet,” in the words of Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, author of We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory and an editor-at-large at Fast Company sister publication Inc. In contrast to the ever greater homogenization of much of the web, moderators have broad latitude to mold each subreddit’s atmosphere and set ground rules. “If you were in a city, you would walk into a library, and then you would walk into a sports bar, and then you would walk into a barbershop, and you would have a completely different experience” in each, says Laura Nestler, the company’s VP of community. “That’s what it’s like on Reddit.”

Reddit’s essential humanity also stands out amid a sea of Google search results, which can feel overrun by spammy, highly search-engine-optimized marketing sites whose overarching goal is to sell you something. The unvarnished dependability of Reddit users’ advice has led to a popular Google hack: Appending “reddit” to a search query—say, “best bank reddit”—dramatically improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the links you get.

As Google has worked to combat this web crud, it’s tweaked its search engine in ways that further buoy Reddit. The algorithm now gives greater emphasis to content created by experts and individuals sharing firsthand experiences. It added a tab dedicated to links from person-to-person forums such as Reddit. Its increased emphasis on quality and authenticity helps explain why Reddit monthly search referrals grew from 1.1 billion to 2 billion from June 2023 to June 2024, according to Similarweb—accounting for the majority of its traffic surge.

The windfall might not last. “I cannot imagine that Google continues to reward Reddit, as much as it does today, in the long run,” says Search Engine Roundtable founder Barry Schwartz. The greater risk is that even a plum spot in Google results will yield less traffic, as GenAI platforms surface answers to queries immediately. Already, Perplexity and Arc Search produce bullet-point summaries on the fly, as if you’d hired someone to browse the web for you; even some Google Search results begin with “AI Overviews” at the top.

So far, these automations are hardly Reddit killers. Their responses can be superficial, outdated, or just plain inaccurate, and they’re never based on the firsthand experiences that fuel Reddit. “You have new products all the time,” Wong says. “Who’s going to review the new Toyota Highlander Grand that just came out last year? A family who actually drove it and sat in it with car seats, who live real life and have an opinion on that new car. Humans interact with the world and then they interpret that world.”

By definition, AI tools also eliminate the community and conversation that attract redditors to the site. “People crave a connection with other people,” Bhat says. “In a world of AI, Reddit’s only become more relevant.” The site’s current traffic surge proves his point.

GenAI is, however, improving rapidly. And if it gets good enough to discourage people from visiting the rest of the web, it would cut off oxygen to the entire medium—a nightmare scenario not just for Reddit but for everyone running content sites. “The Google of today is organized around the principle that it is necessary and even enjoyable to visit websites,” wrote Platformer reporter Casey Newton in February. “The search engines of tomorrow are premised on the idea that it would be far better and more enjoyable not to.”

And yet AI tools don’t just compete with the human-created web; they’re also dependent on its continued existence. Their machine-generated verbiage—the ultra-processed product that results when large language models are trained on vast amounts of content created by people—is informational Soylent Green. It couldn’t be more obvious that Reddit is a drool-worthy trove of such material: comprehensive, timely, well organized, conversational, and even graded for quality, thanks to upvoting and downvoting. “If you could go back in time 20 years and invent a service with the sole focus of trying to collect the best possible text data to train LLMs 20 years later, you would build Reddit,” says Jack Hanlon, the company’s former VP of feeds, AI, search, and data who now works on generative AI at Meta.

The LLMs are ravenous. Their creators raid the internet for source material—usually without permission or disclosure, let alone compensation. That grabbiness is reminiscent of past behavior by tech companies intent on dominating a new field, all the way back to the rise of the PC: “As my mother once said about Bill Gates, ‘He sounds like somebody who’d come over to your house for dinner and say, “I think I’ll have all the mashed potatoes.”’ The AI companies are a little bit like that,” says technologist and publisher Tim O’Reilly.

As ChatGPT and other generative AI products began hitting the market, Reddit didn’t know whether they’d already helped themselves to Reddit’s data as training fodder. The company asked around and found answers frustratingly hard to come by. “Some were more forthright than others,” says Huffman, looking irritated all over again at the memory. “Some lie about it to this day.” And so Reddit took steps to defend itself.

Historically, Reddit had been generous with its data, offering third-party developers free, open access to its API. In April 2023, it reversed course, announcing that it would greatly restrict such use. Along with cutting off freeloading LLMs, the move impacted other API users and led to the demise of Apollo, a beloved alternative Reddit app that offered its roughly 900,000 daily users more features (and no ads).

The decision hit Reddit in a uniquely Reddit way. Angry over the sweeping nature of the API lockdown—and empowered by their broad autonomy—moderators staged a blackout that roiled for weeks, with thousands of subreddits either restricting new posts or going private. As the living personification of Reddit management, Huffman got called a “greedy corporate goonbag” and worse—on Reddit, of course, where he’s known by his “spez” handle and has long borne the brunt of the community’s ire over unpopular moves.

After nine years of reconciling Reddit’s idealism with the realities of operating a business—often to the community’s displeasure—Huffman has grown a thick skin. “All of these decisions were made out of necessity,” he says. The API tightening proceeded largely as planned; in June, the company said it would also block most bots from crawling its site on the public web, another method that AI companies have used to extract data from subreddits that bypassed the API. In an interview with The Verge, Huffman specifically called out Anthropic, Microsoft, and Perplexity for doing this, saying that blocking them was “a real pain in the ass.”

By preventing AI purveyors from just grabbing its data, Reddit set the stage for the second phase of its strategy: signing formal deals with the industry’s key players. In February 2024, it announced a partnership with Google that gave the search giant access to its API and enabled Reddit to use Google AI on its own site. The deal could be vulnerable now that a federal court has ruled against Google in an antitrust suit, but if it stands it could alleviate concerns that its surging Google Search traffic could take a dive: “Google has a long history of crawling us, indexing us, and sending us lots of users,” Huffman says. “That’s worked really well for both of us, and we want to see that continue.” (In July, 404 Media reported that Reddit’s blocking of web crawlers was preventing other search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo from linking to subreddits, a fact Reddit says is unrelated to the Google deal and could change if those companies agree to comply with its crawling guidelines.)

Three months later, Reddit and OpenAI announced a similar agreement. That was not a uniquely big whoop in itself. OpenAI had already forged content deals with the Associated Press, Dotdash Meredith, and the Financial Times, and it would go on to ink deals with The Atlantic, News Corp, and Vox Media. Along with Microsoft, OpenAI is also currently being sued by The New York Times and other newspapers for unauthorized use of its material, giving it every reason to line up partners rather than risk further courtroom drama.

Even so, Reddit isn’t just another media company OpenAI doesn’t want to get sued by. OpenAI CEO Altman couldn’t be more familiar with its value. In 2014, after making the first of multiple investments in Reddit, he said he’d been a daily user since the start, noting, “I shudder to imagine the number of hours I have spent there.”

Altman saw Reddit “as this internet mainstay, which I don’t think many people [did],” says Lagorio-Chafkin. “It was, at the time, a very dingy, dark corner of the internet.” Altman even went on to serve as a stopgap Reddit CEO for eight days during Huffman’s absence, helped to engineer Huffman’s return, and was a member of Reddit’s board until 2022. The details of OpenAI and Reddit’s plans are still under wraps: Huffman is talking about them only in general terms—“everyone wins,” he says—and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. But the announcement made tantalizing reference to “new products” beyond ChatGPT that will leverage Reddit content, raising the possibility of a close collaboration as OpenAI’s ambitions expand. (In July, Open­AI announced SearchGPT, a prototype AI search engine that felt like a warning shot at Reddit’s other AI partner, Google.)

Reddit is also planning to test AI-driven search capabilities. But in the short term, it is getting a boost simply from its proximity to the industry’s hottest technology: Its stock price rose by 14% after the OpenAI announcement. “These guys are wheeling and dealing in the sphere that everyone cares about right now,” says a former insider at the company. “That has a huge value, even apart from whether they’re ever going to make any money.”

The long-term implications of Reddit’s facilitation of AI are yet to play out. On the platform itself, reaction to the Google and OpenAI deals has tended toward the snarky: “Honestly, this seems like a bad idea,” wrote one redditor. “Have you READ reddit?!” More seriously, “There’s an obvious tension between Reddit’s lifeblood being genuine human content and Reddit Inc. signing deals with the likes of Google and OpenAI to hand over its data for LLM training, which enables the capability to flood the internet with AI-generated content,” says Full_Stall_Indicator, a moderator of several subreddits on cars and other topics. With these deals, “Reddit can enforce boundaries.”

Huffman also denies being haunted by the possibility that Reddit, and the human web in general, could be endangered. Imbuing AI with Reddit’s humanity is even a moral obligation, he argues: “AI should reflect the world, and Reddit is the most direct way to achieve that. I mean, what’s the alternative? Your AI is trained on a bunch of newspapers and out-of-copyright books? Talk about a biased view of the world!”

Like every other tech company, Reddit is also embracing AI’s potential to automate its own processes, sometimes in subtle ways. Even well-intentioned members can unwittingly violate the rules in individual subreddits, which are set by moderators and can be opaque to the uninitiated: r/science, for instance, bans jokes. A new AI-based feature frees up moderators’ time by screening posts for basic compliance with such policies. “We are starting to use AI in ways that uniquely touch our users and add value, not just doing a slapdash integration,” Bhat says.

Regardless of AI’s impact on Reddit—and Reddit’s impact on AI—the company needs to keep growing. Marketers still don’t regard the site as a peer of Google, Meta, and Amazon. Can Reddit change that perception by roping in an even larger audience? “We’re not there yet, but I believe we’ll get there,” Wong says. “Everybody has passions and interests, and so I believe that everyone can be on Reddit.”

One focus: adding more international visitors, who account for about half of visits. (By contrast, almost 90% of Facebook users are outside the U.S. and Canada.) Reddit is testing using AI to translate English-language posts into French but knows that meaningful engagement will require content that originates closer to home—“an experience that feels like a local French experience,” as Nestler puts it.

But getting even bigger presents its own challenges. For instance, Facebook Groups are Reddit’s rough equivalent and have far more users. But they’re also a product of Facebook’s obsessive focus on growth hacking: Facebook members must be logged in, giving the site the ability to algorithmically determine which groups they might click on and pump content into their feed. The result is a giant recirculation engine that makes Reddit’s organizing principle—people will find the subreddits they care about, possibly by stumbling across them in Google results—look positively quaint.

To Huffman, that’s a point of pride. “Reddit is the only platform of its scale that’s still open, that still believes in the web,” he says. “People link to us, we link to people, we let people leave Reddit. We don’t trap you in Reddit. It’s the walled gardens that are killing the web. And that, I think, is a real shame, because there’s a whole generation of people who have grown up not really getting to experience the web part of the web.” (Which walled gardens is he talking about? “Literally every other platform!” he stresses with an exasperated laugh, though he does name two exceptions: the WordPress publishing platform and still-extant Tumblr, both owned by Automattic.)

Ultimately, steering Reddit into the future involves multiple conflicting priorities: staying human, confronting AI, and growing without becoming overengineered, anodyne, and claustrophobic. All Reddit is seeking, Huffman says, is “a reasonable middle ground.”

But as much as Reddit has changed, and might change further, it remains recognizable as the site Huffman and Ohanian whipped up nearly two decades ago—far more so than Facebook resembles what Mark Zuckerberg built in his dorm room less than 17 months earlier. That is an achievement—and yet it may also explain why Reddit, against all odds, matters more than ever.

“We have survived because we’ve done things a certain way,” Huffman says. “And sometimes that has meant we’ve been a slower grower than some other folks. But that Reddit way of doing things is why we exist at all.”