Reddit announces new video and text views for your timeline in the hope of making things easier for new users.
Yeah. Look, it’s about helping the new users not trip over all the power user features, and making it something that they can get from the very beginning. I will say, one of the great things that social networks have done is they’ve made it easy for anyone to come use the product and get it from the get-go. On Reddit, one of the cool things we’ve done is focus on having very high-quality conversations. In fact, I would put forth that Reddit is the best place to have conversations online.
Are these changes designed to increase user growth? Is it designed to convert people into Reddit signups? It feels like Reddit’s already pretty big. Are you saying you can get even bigger by making it simpler for people to discover the content? We have over 100,000 active communities growing every day, and you go engage with them in an intentional way. I think that’s the beauty of Reddit, and we want to bring that intentional experience to everyone. So, yes, we have 500 million folks monthly, but that should actually be billions of users.
Absolutely. I think something we got right from day one is getting the community to establish the norms and values that they want for their specific community. Think of Reddit as a community of communities. Each community establishes its own norms and values, and they then go in and ensure that the conversations are staying up to the mark in adherence to those norms and values, which is really awesome.
In many ways, Reddit is the platform that democratizes creation. We usually think of creation as, “Oh, I made a video,” or, “I took a selfie.” But in a very core way, users determining what aspects of conversations, posts, or comments will rise to the top, is one of the acts of democratizing creation that I think Reddit has done really well.is that the true product of any social network is actually content moderation.
One of the pieces of news here is that you’re splitting Reddit into text and video feeds. Every platform is inevitably pulled towards a more video-focused experience, because the advertising dollars are there for pre-roll — that’s just how it works. It’s very hard to say, “Okay, I’m watching a bunch of videos, but I can’t see what the moderators are doing, since they’re not communicating their moderation decisions in video.
By the way, there’s another piece of Reddit you didn’t talk about, which is images. Reddit has the best memes on the internet. There are a bunch of folks who just want to look at memes, and that’s okay too. We see all of that activity growing. We see GIFs in comments increasing, as an example. We’re trying to make sure you can consume Reddit in the way you want and then engage and contribute back to Reddit again in any of these formats.
It actually creates a platform for high-quality conversation talkers. If you think about some of the other platforms, whether they’re focused on photos or videos, ultimately what they’re doing is putting the original piece of content at the center, and then making it all about that piece of content. The conversation isn’t really the important part. We’ve inverted that and said, “Look, the conversation is actually the content.” That’s the fundamental difference in how we approach it.
The pull to video is one of those things that we’ve watched platforms have to reckon with. It sounds like you have a very clear idea of what video is, how you want to engage with video, and how you want your community to engage with video. But it’s there. Every platform CEO or chief product person that I’ve talked to in the past year and a half has been talking about TikTok, whether or not they want to admit that they’re talking about TikTok.
How we internally spend our time thinking about things is still about communities and conversations. The number one thing that I spend my time thinking about is how we keep subreddits the platform for communities and conversations globally. That’s the focus I come in from. The way for us to do that is simplicity. If we made Reddit simple, I’m confident that more people would engage on it every single day than right now — even though the number right now is already very large.
A key part of our focus is really about making subreddits that platform for communities globally, for conversations within those communities, and empowering the users and the moderators. We talked about those two categories of users. And people often forget about the new users coming in as well. That is really the crux of it. The other piece that is very interesting is search, because I do think that we have an opportunity to make search on Reddit better than it is today.
Look, there are certainly dollars in video. We all know that. There’s certainly lots of dollars in video as YouTube or TikTok show every single day. But there’s also a huge demand for getting access to a very intentional audience. Reddit is one of the most intentional audiences out there because you’ve chosen what community to be part of and you’ve chosen the kinds of topics to engage in.
I’ll give you an example. One of the first things I did was post the set of things we wanted to do and opened it up to the community for feedback. This was early last year, shortly after I joined, and the community just said, “Look, your video player is broken. It sucks.” Guess what we did? We started a new subreddit called r/fixthevideoplayer, and we reported progress, received bug reports from our community, and made the video player experience a whole lot better. We can still make it better.
That’s a great question. I think the number one thing is that I start with the step before the decision. I’m focusing on product positions, which is asking, “Why are we even working on something?” It has to ladder up to making life better for at least a segment of our users. You start there, and then once you’ve figured out the “why,” you have to figure out what the priority is for a given area of investment.
Given that, this is a very simple set of product principles, so that our teams can make decisions themselves. Ideally, I want to make decisions at the place where we have the most information, which is with our teams. Only occasionally do really critical decisions bubble up. Once they do, it’s really about the “why” and how we’re helping our users. If we can get happy users, everything else solves itself.
You now effectively run a more successful messaging product than anyone. That’s crazy given that they make the phone software. I guess what I’m getting at, in a more succinct way, is what did you take with you from the Google product culture and what did you leave behind intentionally? I think that is a challenge not just for Google, but for any large company — because even though they might have one mission statement, you tend to have fractured missions once you get to the team level. At Reddit, we are all focused on bringing community and belonging to everyone in the world. It’s that simple. Because of that, we have unified. That’s a piece that I’ve consciously said, “Look, we should never fall into that trap.
I love the amount of innovation that’s happening, even from some of the larger companies like Microsoft, but we come at this from the Reddit perspective of having really great, authentic conversations within a community context. It is different paths, but it’s actually something that’s one step before that. We first need search on Reddit to be great.The reason that people are going to Google and typing in “Reddit” at the end of their keywords is because search on Reddit needs to get better. Now, if search got better, at least for the set of queries that users already know Reddit is good for, then they would just go to Reddit and search for that content.
In terms of how we think about it though, it’s twofold. First, the real value proposition of Reddit is that it’s the human face of the internet. If you want authentic human conversation and genuine interactions, you go to Reddit. It’s high quality and you know what you’re going to get. We believe that’s something there is always going to be a need for.
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