Reddit was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman, Aaron Swartz, and Alexis Ohanian. Since then, it has become one of the largest and liveliest social platforms on the internet. Without Reddit, we might never have AMAs. It’s not quite as mainstream as platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, but Reddit’s seemingly infinite supply of communities — known as subreddits — has made it one of the web’s best sources of information and conversation. But Reddit has also been a magnet for controversy: Redditors have used the platform to spread misinformation and coordinate harassment, and it has been a source of illegal and problematic content for years. In 2023, Reddit brought more controversy on itself, announcing new plans to charge for its API that led to Apollo and other third-party apps shutting down along with a mass protest from users. And of course, like so many other things, the whole fight seemed to happen on Reddit.
The company announced yesterday that search traffic was “down meaningfully,” with CEO Steve Huffman saying that Google’s AI-powered search modes don’t “drive traffic.” Today’s stock market fall was its worst since going public in 2024, CNBC reports.
Yesterday, Reddit also announced that the platform will soon start requiring users to log in.
Write Love Pens, a small pen and stationery shop, had initially used AI-generated images (including one of a pen with two clips on the cap) to advertise surprise boxes that the shop puts together. After getting yelled at on fountain pen Reddit, the shop’s owner apologized, and replaced the AI images with extremely cute amateur drawings.
Snoo is putting on adult pants. The change is set to kick in on Tuesday.
“Reddit’s raw materials are special, and there is so much potential to continue building great products and scaling profitably,” CFO Drew Vollero says in a statement.
[Reddit Inc.]
As part of its efforts to prevent spam and scraping, the company is “exploring different options” for the classic experience, spokesperson Rosa Kim tells The Verge. Reddit recently started requiring users to be logged in if they wanted the classic design.
The company is also announcing big updates for mods and developers. You can read about all of it in my story here.
The era of AI-powered search has made Reddit mentions highly valuable. Subreddit moderators are catching brands trying to take advantage.
A judge rejected Perplexity’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, which accuses the AI startup and three data-scraping services of vacuuming up Reddit’s content without permission. Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, says in a statement to The Verge that the ruling “brings us one step closer to holding bad actors accountable:”
Reddit supports responsible access to public content, but we oppose companies that bypass our protections, ignore our rules, and profit off our communities without permission.
The company’s Q2 2026 shareholder letter mentions that “we’re reimagining how users and communities connect, share, and consume content through a modernized video experience on Reddit.” Wonder if it will make Reddit yet another app with a vertical video feed. The platform turned on video replies in May.
Daily active uniques also reached 130 million users. However, the company is facing “headwinds in users coming from search,” says CEO Steve Huffman.
Reddit has discussed shutting off Google’s access to data used to train its Gemini AI models. Or maybe it’s just a renegotiation bluff now that its $60 million-a-year deal is coming to an end. According to The Wall Street Journal:
… with AI-generated answers to queries reducing clicks to outside websites, Reddit executives are assessing what the upside is of continuing to feed its content to Google, said the people familiar with the matter.
Google Zero comes for us all, eventually.
Reddit is clamping down on spammy AI activity, a problem that is definitely not, in any way, shape, or form, a problem of Reddit’s own making.
Bread19:
Let’s use AI to filter out AI because we sold our content to AI and AI is reading all the AI
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The company says its AI-powered spam detection tools are blocking 23 million spam views each day, while catching around 25,000 new “spammy posts and comments,” and revoking nearly 2 million “inauthentic votes.” Reddit is also working to combat “coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype,” which we’ve seen with AI systems trying to game AI search results.
The logged-out experience on old Reddit is “a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform,” a Reddit admin (employee) says. The company will start requiring anyone who wants to use it to log in “over the next month.”
The admin adds that Reddit “can’t promise” that old Reddit “will be around forever,” though CEO Steve Huffman said last year that the company will figure out how to keep it online “as long as people are using it.”
[Reddit]
They’re initially rolling out as a feature mods can turn on in public and safe-for-work (SFW) subreddits.
On June 11th, the feature will roll out to all users public and SFW subreddits, and it will be on by default unless mods change the setting.
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.
Reddit also wants to reach 100 million daily US users, and “we’re actively executing a strategy to get us there,” Huffman says. In Q1, the platform saw 53.5 million daily active unique users.
[Reddit]
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:
Hey all! Just for clarity, that account was never banned from the site (or the subreddit) there was a technical error that made it appear to be banned from the site. This has now been resolved. Sorry for any confusion this caused or issue for the mod team here!
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.
Update: Reddit appears to be working again.
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.
[The New York Times]
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.
In the age of AI, if you can’t easily distinguish a real person’s thoughts or recommendations from a bot, that trust erodes. That’s why we’re actively working on ways to preserve our authenticity and conversation quality.
Reddit’s big dick subreddit has turned on ICE, who know a thing or two about being dicks themselves.
Species 8472:
and here I thought ICE were the huge dicks
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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:
Teen account holders under 18 everywhere will get a version of Reddit with more protective safety features built in, including stricter chat settings, no ads personalization or sensitive ads, and no access to NSFW or mature content.
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.
[ABC Australia]
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.
