Reddit

Making Reddit faster “remains a meaningful opportunity and can lead to an outsized impact,” says CEO Steve Huffman in the company’s Q1 2026 letter to shareholders released with its earnings.

The musician’s account disappeared after posting pictures from his no-phones-allowed concert to r/PaulMcCartney, spurring media reports that mods had banned him. However, as 404Media points out, the subreddit’s mods say it wasn’t them, and a site admin commented with an attempt at an explanation:

A few of us at The Verge had been seeing issues with Reddit starting a little bit after 3PM ET, including posts not loading on the homepage and a “server error” message, but now the site is loading normally for me.

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office dished out a £14.47 million (about $19.5 million) penalty for Reddit’s previous lack of robust age verification and failure to assess risks to children before January 2025. That’s just a smidge higher than the £247,590 (about $335,000) fine Imgur was hit with for similar reasons earlier this month.

Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta have received “hundreds” of subpoenas from the DHS in recent months, according to a report from The New York Times. The agency is reportedly asking the platforms for the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other information associated with accounts that “track or criticize” ICE.

After rolling out account verification for brands and individual users, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman writes in a letter to shareholders that the platform is trying to make it easier to identify bots, too.

Reddit’s big dick subreddit has turned on ICE, who know a thing or two about being dicks themselves.

In addition to complying with the under-16 social media ban that begins December 10th in Australia, Reddit is making changes globally for under-18s:

It’s been added to the list of social media sites that will be required to block under-16s in the country, alongside Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook, and Instagram. Local Twitch rival Kick has also made the cut. The ban kicks in December 10th, the next stage in age-gating the internet.

That’s according to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who highlighted the “mix” of 70 million weekly users browsing Reddit directly, or landing on the platform through Google searches, as reported earlier by SEO Roundtable. Huffman noted that “external search will continue to be a big driver of new users” even as AI-generated answers pose a threat to the site’s traffic.

Sources tell Semafor that Reddit wants to combat AI bots using World ID, the cryptocurrency and human identification project co-founded by Altman. It uses an iris scanner known as the Orb to assign people a World ID, which Semafor says Reddit could use to verify human users while keeping them anonymous.