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Updates on Reddit talk, mod tools, image editing, and… we’re moving!
Since we last talked in 2021, here at Reddit we’ve shipped a few updates, cleaned up some code, fixed some bugs, and done a lot of New Year’s planning and reorganizing—and now we’re here to chat about it. Thanks in part to a lot of the feedback you’ve given on these r/blog posts, the first bit of news is that these posts (and all of the posts in r/blog) are moving on up to our new apartment in the sky at r/reddit.
At the end of last year, you let us know that having different admin-run communities that focus on a variety of niche topics (some of which overlap) is confusing. And, you know what, you were right. Knowing where to post what announcement got confusing for us too. But no more. Moving forward, posts that you would normally read here in r/blog and other places like r/announcements and r/changelog will all be over in r/reddit.
That means, today’s post will be the last r/blog post, but in two weeks you’ll see me posting over in r/reddit instead. And we’ll also be sharing more about the long-term product goals and roadmap, featuring more in-depth dives into specific updates (keep an eye out for more episodes from the Search team), and even some history on Reddit and how this crazy corner of the internet got to be the way it is. (Check out this recent gem from u/kethryvis on the birth of subreddits.) And for more about r/reddit and the changes to admin-run communities, check out u/Go_JasonWatersfalls’ post all about it.
Until then, let’s make this last post count eh? For the last time in r/blog…
Here’s what’s new in 2022
(Ok, did not mean for that to rhyme, but we’ll go with it.)
New features for Reddit Talk
Since its introduction last year, over 1,000 communities have used Reddit Talk to host live audio conversations in their communities, including a r/cryptocurrency Reddit Talk featuring Kevin O’Leary; a r/movies Reddit Talk with Johnny Knoxville, Chris Pontius, and Paul Scheer; a r/space Reddit Talk with Chris Hadfield; as well as community talks in r/wallstreetbets, r/dadjokes, and r/relationship_advice.
With help and feedback from moderators, a number of new features were introduced throughout the last month:
- Recordings so community members can listen to Reddit Talks after they’ve happened. (I HIGHLY recommend you check out the recording of this r/dadjokes open mic night.)
- A web experience so more redditors can access and take part in talks.
- Comments and emojis so listeners have more ways to interact and enjoy talks.
- A live talk bar so that it’s easier to know when talks are taking place in communities you’re a part of. (This one’s an experiment.)
Thanks to all the mods, communities, and early-adoptors who partnered with us on this latest round of updates. To learn more about the new features and see how you can host a talk in your community, head over to the latest r/modnews post, check out reddit.com/talk, or listen to the recording of the AMA with the Reddit Talk team and fellow moderators.
A small update to make life easier for mods
In 2021, a big focus was building tools that make mods’ lives easier and in 2022 that work continues. With the latest update to Crowd Control, moderators can choose to review posts from people who aren’t trusted members of their community yet in Modqueue before they go live to the whole community. It’s an extra tool mods can use to combat spam or people interacting with their community in bad faith.
New image editing tools
To make it easier to post images directly to Reddit, next week those adding images on iOS will have the ability to crop, rotate, or markup images with text, stickers, or drawings. Next up is Android, so stay tuned for more updates. And here’s Luna to demonstrate what’s possible:
Small but mighty updates
The latest round of release notes from the native apps.
On Android
- The new full-screen video player has come to Android, complete with performance updates and improved recommendations. There will be many more refinements and features coming to the new player soon, so keep an eye on r/reddit for more.
- Now mods can tap the flag on reported comments to get more details.
- You can swipe down to dismiss videos now.
- Fixed a bug with navigating comments on videos.
- Fixed the “people are here” indicator so it doesn’t obstruct any text or actions.
- Fixed an issue where some crossposted videos wouldn’t expand.
On iOS
- Fixed a bug that sometimes hid the close icon when posting.
- Fixed a bug that prevented clearing the flair search bar in mod tools.
- Made some improvements to adding links in text posts and comments.
Thanks for following all the updates here in r/blog. Even though we won’t be posting anything new in this community, all the posts and comments will be saved and available so you can reference them whenever you’d like. I’ll be hanging around for a bit today to answer questions and will see you in two weeks over in r/reddit.
18:00 UTC
Announcing Blocking Updates
Hello peoples (and bots) of Reddit,
I come with a very important and exciting announcement from the Safety team. As a continuation of our blocking improvements, we are rolling out a revamped blocking experience starting today. You will begin to see these changes soon.
What does “revamped blocking experience” mean?
We will be evolving the blocking experience so that it not only removes a blocked user’s content from your experience, but also removes your content from their experience—i.e., a user you have blocked can’t see or interact with you. Our intention is to provide you with better control over your safety experience. This includes controlling who can contact you, who can see your content, and whose content you see.
What will the new block look like?
It depends if you are a user or a moderator and if you are doing the blocking vs. being blocked.
[See stickied comment below for more details]
![[See stickied comment below for more details]](https://preview.redd.it/csgoq5pj3hc81.png?width=2646&format=png&auto=webp&s=7b3d6032052dc670f6d8496c767a91af8bbbb2f1){kind=link}
How is this different from before?
Previously, if I blocked u/IAmABlockedUser, I would not see their content, but they would see mine. With the updated blocking experience, I won’t see u/IAmABlockedUser’s content and they won’t see mine either. We’re listening to your feedback and designed an experience to meet users’ expectations and the intricacies of our platform.
Important notes
To prevent abuse, we are installing a limit so you cannot unblock someone and then block them again within a short time frame. We have also put into place some restrictions that will prevent people from being able to manipulate the site by blocking at scale.
It’s also worth noting that blocking is not a replacement for reporting policy breaking content. While we plan to implement block as a signal for potential bad actors, our Safety teams will continue to rely on reports to ensure that we can properly stop and sanction malicious users. We're not stopping the work there, either—read on!
What's next?
We know that this is just one more step in offering a robust set of safety controls. As we roll out these changes, we will also be working on revamping your settings and finding additional proactive measures to reduce unwanted experiences.
So tell us: what kind of safety controls would you like to see on Reddit? We will stick around to chat through ideas as well as answer your questions or feedback on blocking for the next few hours.
Thanks for your time and patience in reading this through! Cat tax:
Oscar Wilde, the cat, reclining on his favorite reddit snoo pillow
edit (update): Hey folks! Thanks for your comments and feedback. Please note that while some of you may see this change soon, it may take some time before the changes to blocking become available on for everyone on all platforms. Thanks for your patience as we roll out this big change!
16:30 UTC
Several people are typing… Updates on scrolling bananas, animations, naming servers, and (you guessed it) typing indicators
Hi redditors!
It’s that special time of year again… The holidays are in full swing, people are sharing their end of year recap and rewinds, and here at Reddit our annual end-of-year code freeze is fast approaching. We’ve been busy getting new projects and updates out the door before the code freezes next week, so there’s some fun stuff to go over. Let’s dive in, shall we?
Here’s what’s new November 19th–December 17th
Your 2021 Reddit Recap is here!
If you haven’t noticed the subtle narwhal icon, notifications, and general chatter about Reddit Recap across the platform, you’re missing valuable insights about your year on Reddit. Want to know what communities you spent the most time in? What your top comment was? Or how many bananas you scrolled? Check out your recap to learn all this and more.
https://reddit.com/link/ripui0/video/53az9orsu5681/player
Vote and comment counts may start to look more lively
Over the next several months, you may notice a few experiments running that help you identify which posts are seeing the most action, the first of which are new animations to show you live changes to vote and comment counts. Here’s an example:
https://i.redd.it/ffy7qhxma5681.gif
And an important callout—if you’ve opted out of animations in your settings you won’t see these animations either.
Several people are typing…
Another update to help give redditors a better sense of how active a post or thread is, are reading and typing indicators. Keep an eye on the bottom of posts for a count of how many people are viewing/reading it and commenting at the same time you are. Here’s what it’ll look like:
A small update to make it easier to create communities
Previously there were more steps to create a community and we’re testing removing a few of them. This will make it easier for new moderators to create their communities and finish setting them up (by doing things like adding a community icon, description, and topics) once they’re formed.
Goodbye ServerMcServerface
Back in 2013, r/nameaserver was created as a fun way to thank Reddit Premium (then called Gold) members by letting them name an actual real Reddit server. It’s been a fun ride and our engineers have loved working on servers like FBI-DontCheckThisOne, MostlyCatsButSomePorn, and ItHurtsWhenIP. However, we recently realized this initiative had slipped through the cracks over the years, and that the community and the names were largely unmoderated. On top of that we also learned that technically things don’t really work the same way anymore with the servers or Reddit Premium (as we’ve been told by the more tech-savvy admins who started this whole thing)—so the time has come for r/nameaserver to say goodbye. If you’d like to reminisce with the community before it goes, head over to the goodbye post. And to the redditors that have participated, thank you! Each ServerMcServerface represents someone who has supported Reddit.
Small but mighty updates
Bugs, smaller tests, and rollouts of features we’ve talked about previously.
On all platforms
- New redditors who have opted in to push notifications will receive a series of new notifications that welcome them to Reddit and show them the ropes more.
On iOS and Android
On Android
- There’s more of a click ripple effect on the app, to make it easier to know when the app has responded to your actions.
- Related communities shown at the end of the comments section are shown in a list view now.
- While signing up you can tap the back button on the topic screen without leaving the flow now.
- After leaving Anonymous Browsing mode, you can click on links and screens will render correctly again.
On iOS
- After the initial test, now all redditors on iOS can add links to their profile. Check out the original post to see what changed or go check it out. And if you’re on Android, we’ll be rolling this out to you in the first update of the new year.
- You can use the spoiler tag on posts to your profile now.
Thanks for being a part of these updates throughout the year and have a wonderful holiday seasons! We’ll be on a break for a bit and will be back in the new year with more to share.
20:15 UTC
Reddit Recap 2021
13:00 UTC
More improvements for Reddit search and a few small bug fixes
Hi redditors and happy Friday! (In case you didn’t notice, we’ve moved these updates to fortnightly on Fridays.) Today we have a short post where we’ll be talking about what’s up with Reddit search.
Here’s what’s new November 5th–November 18th
Reddit Search is redesigned and more relevant
As was announced in last Thursday’s r/changelog post, there are a number of improvements to search that you may or may not have noticed. First off, the new search design is out to 100% of redditors on the web, and iOS and Android design updates are in the works. We’d love to hear how the search experience is working for you, so let us know what you think in this quick survey.
If you haven’t checked it out yet, here’s what it looks like:
In addition to updating the look of Reddit search, the search team is continually improving search relevance (aka, improving the results themselves) through a series of experiments. This month, the team is also rolling out a new GraphQL powered API, which (for those of you who don’t know about such things) will make Reddit search much faster and more reliable. Check out the original post for more details about each effort.
In early 2022, the team also plans to release a first version of comment search, but we want to hear from you—Let us know what you think of the recent changes and any wishlist items you think we should tackle next. We’ll use your feedback to help prioritize the next round of work.
A few small updates
Bugs and a quick test we're running with new redditors
On all platforms
- New redditors who have opted in to push notifications will receive a series of new notifications that welcome them to Reddit and show them the ropes.
On Android
- Fixed a design bug where the next comment button isn’t hidden under the comment composer anymore.
On iOS
- Fixed a bug in the sign up flow where tapping the back button took people out of the flow.
A short one this week, but we'll be sharing more soon. Thanks and have a great weekend!
21:46 UTC
Extra Life, links on profiles, Reddit Talk on the web, and moderator bug fixes
Hello again and happy Friday. We have some fun partnerships, big bug fixes, and further feature rollouts to go over today, so let’s dive in…
Here’s what’s new October 16th–November 5th
Calling all gamers! Extra Life 2022 starts tomorrow!
This year is the 10the anniversary of Reddit’s partnership with Extra-Life, a 24-hour gaming marathon benefiting Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. Join us tomorrow November 6 at 9:00 PST for fun, games, and the opportunity to support a great cause and some amazing kids.
Here’s how you can take part:
- Sign up and get donations from your network.
- Donate to Team Reddit
- Donate directly at Extra-Life.org
- Follow the action and the 25-hour live stream at r/TheGamerLounge, r/pan, or r/ExtraLife
Donations to Children's Miracle Network Hospitals help fund critical treatment and healthcare services, pediatric medical equipment, and charitable care at 170 member children's hospitals. We look forward to playing with you and helping out this awesome cause.
Now you can add links to your profile
Some of you who use the official iOS or Android apps may notice a slightly new look to profiles, along with the ability to add links to your profile. If you’re an artist who wants to share more of your work, a musician who wants to put your SoundCloud out there, or if you have a personal website you’d like to add to your Reddit profile, now you can. Here’s what it looks like:
Currently, this is running as an experiment to a select number of redditors, but we’ll be making it available to everyone in the coming months.
Listen to Reddit Talk on the web
In October, communities across Reddit hosted 37 talks, including a few with thousands of listeners like the r/wallstreetbets talk with 26K listeners and the r/halloween immersive haunted house that had 9.3K listeners. (It was pretty spooky.) And now talks are even more widely available, because you can listen in on the web. Here’s a taste of what the experience is like:
If you’re interested in hosting a talk in your community, learn more and sign up for the waiting list.
Modmail bugs CM-660 and CM-607 have been fixed
As was announced over in r/modnews, we fixed two long standing bugs that had been annoying moderators—one in modmail and one around muting. Thanks to those of you who reported the bugs, and for being patient with us while our developers worked out a solution.
League of Legends fans, get your Arcane avatar gear
League of Legends’ Arcane is coming to Netflix on November 6th, and for an extra bit of LoL fun, Arcane avatars will drop every week starting this week until Nov. 22nd. Visit your profile and tap the Style Avatar button to see the new gear or visit https://www.reddit.com/avatar now. Here’s the Vi and Jinx, the first two:
A few more updates that require less explanation
Bugs, tests, and rollouts of features we’ve talked about previously.
On all platforms
- When you sign up for Reddit, we’ve changed the flow slightly to be more welcoming and explain how Reddit works a bit more.
- Starting Monday, the ability to get notifications about a post or comment you’re especially interested in (and essentially, follow a post or comment), that we talked about a few months back, will be available to all logged in redditors on all platforms. Just tap a notification/bell icon or the “…” overflow menu on a post or comment to get notifications on new activity. Redditors can get notifications on as many posts or threads as they’d like, opt out of updates at any time, and notifications will also automatically expire after a week. (One caveat is that only 1,000 people can opt in to a single post or comment at one time, so if it’s a super popular post, get in there early.)
On Android
- While signing up you can tap the back button without leaving the flow now.
- When you switch tabs on a profile or community, the tab text color changes to let you know where you are.
- Profile background images scale properly even after you rotate your screen now.
On iOS
- Updated the quarantined community screen to be more clear.
- Tweaked the recently visited communities on top of home and popular to be more relevant.
- Now you can expand video comments full screen.
Thanks for sticking around! We’ll be here to answer questions as best we can and hear your thoughts and ideas.
20:37 UTC
Post insights, subreddit swag, predictions, and Modmail’s gone to the Dark(Mode) side
Happy Friday, everyone! We have some fun things to share today and would love to hear your thoughts about them. Let’s get to it.
Here’s what’s new October 1st–October 15th
Redditors like data, numbers, and math right? How about some post insights?
Many moons ago (3 years worth of moons) view counts on posts were discontinued because of scaling issues, but now those scaling issues have been solved and view counts are back along with a few other stats. As was announced last week, moderators and post creators on the web will begin to see different insights on post performance including total post views, upvote rate, community karma, and total shares.
Right now, it’s out to 50% of redditors on desktop, but you can see a preview here:
Example of stats and insights from one of our r/blog posts
If seeing more insights is something people like, we’ll roll the feature out to other platforms and explore adding more stats and information. Moderators have already shared some ideas about what they’d be interested in seeing, including knowing where traffic to a post is coming from or video views for live streams—what do you think? Check out the original post to learn more and see what was discussed, or share your ideas here about what insights about posts you’re interested in.
Stickers, totes, t-shirts, and more... subreddit swag is here!
In a new very-limited but very exciting test, a select few pilot communities will be hosting stores that sell merchandise and swag from their communities. Those participating are r/askhistorians, r/animalsonreddit, r/fantasy, r/goforgold, r/pan, and r/writingprompts; so if you’ve been longing for a t-shirt with the writing prompts knight or a stabby awards tote, now’s your time to go snag one before they run out.
Here’s some of the available gear:
Community gear and swag you can get as part of the pilot program
For the pilot, net profits from swag sales will go to a community pot, where funds will be directed towards community-related expenses such as bot hosting, community events and gifts, and more. If the pilot goes well and it’s something communities and redditors like, we’ll expand the program to more interested communities and build out more ways moderators can control what they sell and how they’d like to use the profits. Visit participating communities to check out the available swag, or visit the original announcement to learn more about how the program works.
Now mods can turn on Predictions in every community
If you’ve ever checked out the Predictions tournaments in communities like r/movies or r/Predictor and looked on with envy, waiting for the day when you could add Predictions to your community, well, today is that day. Now moderators of communities that are public, safe for work, and have at least 10,000 members can turn on Predictions.
An example of how Predictions work
Check out the new fancy schmancy information page or our blog post to learn more about what Predictions are, how they work, and how to have a Predictions tournament in your community.
Modmail in Dark Mode and other Modtools improvements
Last week over in r/modnews we announced a few different updates to Modtools, you may have missed:
- As part of our ongoing quest for feature parity and a desire to protect your retinas, Modmail is now available in Dark Mode.
- Mods using the native Reddit apps will be able to directly access their Mod Feeds and Mod Queue through their profile menu.
- A list of “under the hood” improvements were made to uplevel the entire experience.
Check out the original post to see the full list of improvements, get a walk through of how to turn Dark Mode on and off, and learn all the nitty gritty details.
A few updates that require less explanation
Bugs, tests, and rollouts of features we’ve talked about previously.
On the web
- We’re running a test to ask people who are logged out but going through a comment thread to log in or sign up to comment when they click a “X more replies” link.
On Android
- The community tab will show the correct error if it fails to load communities now.
On iOS
- The set of camera and editing tools that were previously only available on Android are now coming to iOS. Starting last week, 50% of redditors on Android have a set of camera tools that includes letting you use lenses (filters you can turn on while filming), flip the camera, turn on the flash, set a timer for recording, and more. And on the editing side, now you can adjust clips, add text, and export your videos with a watermark. These tools are just the beginning of new video creation tools coming to Reddit, and will roll out to more people and platforms over time.
Thanks for reading! We’ll be here to answer questions and listen to your feedback and ideas.
20:44 UTC
Commenting on archived posts, images in chat, and classes for mods
Happy Friday all y’all. We’re back with another plethora of product updates. Let’s check ‘em out.
Here’s what’s new September 9th–October 1
Voting and commenting on archived posts (aka unarchiving posts)
Ever had this happen to you?—You’ve just finished a great book and are dying to talk about it, so you go on Reddit and find a post about that very book. But alas… the post is over 6 months old and archived. You can’t comment. You can’t vote. You can’t do anything but sit there, alone with your thoughts, wondering what might have been. If this has ever been you, it turns out you aren’t alone. Every day 6.6 million people visit archived posts they can’t vote or comment on.
That’s why we ran a pilot program this summer with a variety of interested communities to let redditors comment and vote on archived posts. During the program archived posts received 147K more upvotes (+2.86%) and 236K more comments (+1.48%), while mod actions only increased by .03%.
After seeing these results and getting feedback from mods and communities about how it went, there’s now an Archive Posts toggle mods can turn off in Mod Tools to allow commenting and voting on posts older than 6 months. Starting October 13, any community with the toggle off will have unarchived posts. (And as part of this change, Automod has also been updated to flag comments on posts older than 6 months.)
Unarchived posts may not be a good fit for every community (such as sports, news, or politics subs that are more focused on real-time discussions) but can be great for those with evergreen content (such as food, recipe, and gaming communities). To learn more about the pilot, and hear thoughts from the mods who participated, head over to the original r/modnews post.
Now there are images and slash commands in chat
Image sharing has been one of the most-requested chat features and now it’s here. Starting this week, select redditors can start sharing images in chat and then over the next couple weeks it’ll be released more broadly.
And if you like shortcuts (and who doesn’t) then you’ll be happy to hear that now you can use slash commands in chat too. Just type / in a chat and a menu will pop up showing you the available commands.
To learn more about these two updates and what else the chat team is up to, head over to the r/changelog announcement.
Check out the new mod certification program
To make it easier for mod teams to train new moderators, we’ve created two self-guided classes that help new mods understand how to set up and run a community using Reddit’s suite of mod tools.
An introduction for anyone who has a new or inactive community that they want to set up and grow.
A more advanced course for mod teams of active communities and first-time moderators that have recently joined an active moderator team.
Mod certification is open for testing now and mods can also get one-on-one support from r/RedditCommunityMentor. More education and resources for new mods is on the way, so head over to the r/modnews post to learn more.
A few updates that require less explanation
Bugs, tests, and rollouts of features we’ve talked about previously.
On Android
- We’re running a small test to see if people like signing up with a phone number instead of an email to verify their account.
- When you log out, go to the Home tab, tap on Sign Up, go back to the Popular tab, then open any post, the app won’t crash anymore.
- Profiles display correctly after using a shortcut again.
- Spoilers work correctly in long comments again.
- You won’t get an error while saving a comment when logged out anymore.
- The expand arrow icon on community rules is visible in Dark Mode now.
On iOS
- Now you can reply to comments on live streams.
- We’re running a small test to add the ability to reply and react to notification in-line.
- The app won’t crash while crossposting a post with a title containing non-ASCII characters anymore.
Thanks for reading! We’ll be here to answer questions and listen to your feedback and ideas.
18:34 UTC
Opt out of followers, front-end improvements to Reddit search, and an experiment to inspire new communities
Hey everyone,
Happy Friday and welcome back to another update. We’ve recently finished up a series of projects on followers and the search team has another update with some new features and designs for the web to check out. Let’s get to it.
Here’s what’s new August 20th–September 10th
Three updates that give redditors control over followers
After listening to your feedback here in r/blog and in other communities like r/changelog and r/modnews, we’ve shipped a series of updates to improve and expand redditors’ control over their followers.
- Opt-out of followers
As was announced a few weeks ago over in r/changelog, you can now opt-out of followers. To update your settings, head over to your account settings on iOS and Android or to the profile tab in your user settings on the web. And to learn more about how the opt-out works, check out the original announcement.
- View and manage who follows you on the web
Previously launched on iOS and Android, now those on the web can view and manage their followers as well. To see your followers on the web, visit your profile and click on the arrow next to your follower count. This will take you to a searchable list of your followers (in order from newest to oldest) where you can choose to follow someone back or visit their profile.
- Notifications about people who follow you are back on
If you’ve turned on notifications, when someone new follows you, we’ll let you know via a push notification or email.
For those of you who were a target of abuse using the followers feature, we’re very sorry and want to thank you for reporting and blocking accounts for harassment (thanks to your help, we were able to take action on a lot of bad actors) and for your patience and understanding as we worked on adding the opt-out.
Reddit is now available in the Microsoft Store
Now there’s an official Reddit client for browsing Reddit on Windows available on PC, mobile devices, and Hub. Visit the Microsoft Store to get it now.
More updates on the ongoing effort to improve Reddit search
After previous updates on infrastructure and relevance tests, the Reddit Search team is back with another round of improvements focused on front-end changes to the web. Here’s what’s new:
- Default search within communities
You asked and we listened—now when you’re visiting a community, the default search will be within that community instead of all of Reddit.
- Updated UI for the web
To make it easier to find what you’re looking for, we’ve simplified the two tabs on search result pages to Posts and Communities and People.
- A new safe search toggle for NSFW content
To make it easier to control whether Not Safe for Work (NSF) content shows up in your search results, there’s a new safe search toggle on the search results pages of redditors who have confirmed that they’re over 18. (Just like before, any redditors who haven’t confirmed that they’re 18+ won’t see the toggle or any content tagged as NSFW.)
Check out the full update over in r/changelog, or take the new search UI for a spin and let us know what you think of the changes.
An experiment for a new setting to collapse potentially disruptive comments
This week, we launched an experiment with a new setting that gives users the option to limit their exposure to potentially disruptive content within comments (this could include things like insults, threats, and hateful or abusive language). If you opt in, you'll be able to select the strength of the setting (High, Medium, or Low) which will determine how much content is collapsed. Right now, this setting is only available for a limited number of users that were randomly selected to be in the experiment. It is also only available in the English language. To learn more check out the How does disruptive comment collapsing work? FAQ.
A new way to create communities—forking
Reddit gets a lot of popular posts that generate thousands of comments, and some of those comments end up gaining enough traction that they end up forking off into their own community. (Check out r/birthofasub for more on this phenomenon.) To see if it makes sense to encourage more community forks, starting last week some redditors will begin to see a prompt encouraging them to create a new community about a popular post. If this is something that redditors find helpful and fun, we’ll look into expanding the feature and exploring more ways to fork communities. Check out the original post to see what it looks like and learn more.
A few updates that require less explanation
Bugs, tests, and rollouts of features we’ve talked about previously.
On all platforms
- Our quest for cross-platform parity between our native app and desktop continues. Last week we began rendering thumbnails in the app similar to how we do on desktop. This update doesn’t affect old.reddit or your individual user settings.
On mobile web
- If you visit a Reddit post from a Google or web search, post pages will now include related topics so you can discover communities and posts similar to the one you landed on.
On Android and iOS
- After getting feedback from moderators after the initial announcement, moderator push notifications are available to all mods. These push notifications can be customized by each individual mod, and can be updated from your notification settings.
On Android
- Profiles display correctly after using a shortcut again.
- Spoilers work correctly in long comments again.
- The app won’t crash when you log out, go to the Home tab, tap on Sign Up, go back to the Popular tab
- While posting to a profile you moderate, you can view and update a post’s schedule information again.
- If you decide to post to your profile instead of a community you moderate, your post won’t be a scheduled post by default anymore.
On iOS
- Now you can reply to comments on live streams.
- Notifications are loading properly again.
We’ll be around to answer questions and hear feedback.
19:23 UTC
Safety updates, automod improvements, and pilot programs taking off
Hey everyone,
There have been a lot of updates and happenings over the past two weeks in r/modnews and r/changelog, and we’ve rounded up everything here so you can see them all in one place. Have a great week and don’t forget to let us know what you think. (We know you will.)
Here’s what’s new August 3rd–August 20th
More visibility into comments from blocked users
As part of our ongoing efforts to upgrade Reddit’s existing blocking feature, we’ve changed the way comments from accounts you’ve blocked work. Previously, when someone you blocked commented in a thread you were viewing, that comment and all the replies were hidden (or collapsed for mods). This could be confusing and meant you couldn’t see or report comments from the person you blocked. Now, when you come across a comment from someone you’ve blocked, the comment will be collapsed with a note explaining that you’ve blocked them. If you choose to, you can ignore it and scroll on by, or expand the comment to view it.
Here are two examples of what it looks like:
Providing resources to those who may be in need
Reddit has partnered with Crisis Text Line since 2019 to provide redditors with 24/7 support from trained Crisis Counselors. Previously, redditors could only find these resources if a concerned redditor reported something that worried them. Now, those using Reddit search to look for things that signal they may be seeking support for themselves or others will see relevant Reddit communities where they can get support, as well as information about Crisis Text Line and other off-platform support resources.
And a special thank you on this project goes out to the moderators over at r/SuicideWatch*, whose expert advice and guidance was a major influence on how we reach out to people with these resources.*
Hey mods, check out these automod improvements
For all you mods out there, heads up—there are two changes to automod you may be interested in.
- Now you can use the verified email attribute to check if people posting and commenting have verified email addresses.
- Automod action reasons will be displayed in the modqueue on the web. And if you hover over the Removal reason link on posts and comments, you can also see when and why automod removed something. (This will be available for iOS and Android later this year.)
For more information and details about the update, visit r/modnews.
Reddit Talk’s pilot program has begun!
Over the past several weeks, moderators in communities across Reddit have been experimenting with hosting live audio talks. You may have had a chance to take part in a live meditation and follow up discussion in r/mediation, join r/toastme for some wholesome conversation and support, or spill all the tea with r/TheBachelor. But if you missed out, there are more talks to come, including one that's already scheduled for the 24th:
- r/stories: 8/24, 5:00 p.m. PSTJoin a live AMA with Matthew Dicks, 53x The Moth winner and author.
More talks are coming at the end of August and into September from r/cryptocurrency, r/nosleep, r/wallstreetbets, r/tifu, r/fire, and more. Check out the schedule to see them all or apply to host your own Reddit Talk
Introducing more custom app icons
Now there are four new custom app icons featuring some of your favorite things… Doge and space. There’s a selection of icons for everyone, and then some super special ones just for Reddit Premium members. Visit your settings on the Android and iOS app to add some style to your home screen.
A few updates that require less explanation
Bugs, tests, and rollouts of features we’ve talked about previously.
On all platforms
- We’ve made a few updates to community welcome messages based on feedback from moderators. Now there’s more emphasis on community rules, encouragement to post, and larger character counts. You can learn more and see what it looks like over on the original post in r/modnews.
On mobile web
- If you visit a Reddit post from a Google or web search, post pages will now include related topics so you can discover communities and posts similar to the one you landed on.
On Android
- Those of you who upload a lot of videos on Android may start to see a new set of camera and editing tools. Starting last week, 50% of redditors on Android have a set of camera tools that includes lettings you use lenses (filters you can turn on while filming), flip the camera, turn on the flash, set a timer for recording, and more. And on the editing side, now you can adjust clips, add text, and export your videos with a watermark. These tools are just the beginning of new video creation tools coming to Reddit, and will roll out to more people and platforms over time.
- Now you can reply to comments on the chats during live streams.
- The information related to comments (like the commenter’s username) is clickable again.
On iOS
- Redditors who haven’t joined a lot of communities yet will see a prompt asking them what topics they’re interested in to improve their recommendations.
- Post previews for recommended communities display correctly again.
- Usernames show up on posts in classic view again.
- If you try to swipe past the last image in a media gallery you won’t crash the app anymore.
We’ll be around to answer questions and hear feedback. And we’re still collecting thoughts about these updates themselves. So far people have asked for more information on bug fixes and long-term plans. Let us know what else you’d like to see by filling out this quick survey.
17:09 UTC
Chat improvements, a progress report on Reddit Search, and a very special episode about the new video player
Hi there redditors,
Today we have lots to share—new quick actions on chat, progress on the ongoing effort to improve Reddit search, a few small changes to make your Reddit Daily Digest more fun, and an update and apology on Reddit’s video player.
Here’s what’s new July 14th–August 3rd
Reducing spam and making it easier to manage group chats and invitations
Over the past year, the chat team has been collecting feedback from the community and two things that consistently come up are (you may have guessed it from the title above)... reducing spam and improving the ways you manage group chats and invitations.
One of the first steps to fighting spam is making it easier for people to mark messages as spam, so our systems can identify and address bad actors more quickly and efficiently. Now, on iOS and Android, you can mark invites as spam, ignore and accept them, or block them from quick action menus that are revealed when you slide left on each invite.
And on the web, in addition to the ignore and an invite, invite screens will now present a third option to mark as spam.
This is just the beginning of many changes in store for chat in the coming months, so head over to the original post in r/changelog to see more details about the updates and hear about slash commands, new filters, and other upgrades coming soon.
Improving Reddit search to be more relevant and easy to use
In April, we made an announcement about our plans to improve Reddit search, and last Tuesday the search team was back with an update on their progress. The TL;DR is that new relevance experiments, features, and humans (we’ve brought on an entirely new frontend team) have helped bring about a few significant improvements.
- More relevant search results
We’ve run a series of experiments to improve search results by including results with less restrictive matching, considering search intent, and adding spelling suggestions.
- A simplified design
Keep an eye out for design changes to better distinguish posts and comments from communities and profiles, and a “Safe Search” toggle that lets you choose whether to show Not Safe for Work (NSFW) results for any given search.
- Community search and new filters
Thanks to those of you who took part in the survey back in March, we’ve prioritized changing how community search on desktop works so that it defaults to searching within a community instead of searching all of Reddit (this change is out now and being tested), and adding more filters.
Check out last Tuesday’s search update to read all the details about how the relevance tests did, see a sneak preview of the design updates, and give more feedback.
Addressing the new video player
Yesterday, in an announcement over in r/changelog, we went over the very buggy rollout of the new video player, owned up to our mistakes, explained why we're making changes to the player in the first place, and gave an update on what's next and how we're going to fix it.
While trying to make the player better, we made some things worse. And one of the biggest things we dropped the ball on, is making sure commenting and engaging with the comments works for everyone. What we’ve heard from all of you is that the new video player makes it harder to comment and discuss what’s happening. This isn’t good and was never the intention, so we’re going to fix it ASAP.
The following changes to address this launched last week:
- You can access play/pause and mute controls when the comments thread is partially open.
- The video pauses when the comments thread is fully open.
- The “next comment” widget is back (the thing that looks like three upside down chevrons).
- Tapping on the post title in your feed opens up the video with the comments thread partially open.
And we have additional changes on the way. To get all the gory details about what went wrong (a series of cascading unfortunate events, that started with a HUGE mistake that rightly pissed off a lot of people) and learn more about how we’re fixing forward, check out the original post.
A few updates that require less explanation
Bugs, tests, and rollouts of features we’ve talked about previously.
On all platforms
- Now you can easily share your avatar. Just create your avatar the way you always do, then hit the Share button and select Share this Avatar to get a link you can share wherever you’d like.
- For those of you subscribed to the Reddit Daily Digest, an email newsletter with a roundup of posts from your favorite communities, we’re rotating in a few fun features such as a daily meme, today in Reddit history, cats, and completely random posts we hope you’ll find fun.
- As was announced last month in r/modnews, we removed a number of dormant communities and made their names available for future community creators. The first wave of removals was last week, and the second wave is now. So keep an eye out for new community names you may want to resurrect.
On Android
- We’ve been testing a new way to discover communities on iOS for a while and now it’s Android’s turn. Starting tomorrow, redditors on Android may see a new tab called Discover. The new space has a few familiar features like a list of communities you follow, along with some new things such as a way to browse posts by topics and a scrollable feed with a mix of content. Keep an eye out for the new experience or check out a preview of what it looks like in the original changelog post.
- Icons in the mod actions menu look good in Dark Mode now.
On iOS
- You can see post flair while creating a post in Dark Mode now.
- The custom feed page won’t automatically scroll after expanding descriptions now.
- While editing a post, the “Do you want to discard your changes?” pop up won’t show if you haven’t made any changes.
- The community tab header won’t cover content anymore.
- Images and videos will load faster if you have a large photo library while creating a post now.
- Thumbnail images will show a resized/smaller version of the image instead of a placeholder image.
- Voting on polls has consistent design/UI now.
- Header colors on collection posts won’t change if you leave the collection and then come back.
Phew, thanks for hanging in there. We’ll be sticking around to answer questions and hear feedback. And for the next few updates, we’ll also be asking your thoughts about these updates themselves. Do you find them helpful? Would you like more information about long-term projects or better ways to give feedback? So far people have asked for more information on bug fixes, let us know what else you’d like to see and hear by filling out this quick survey.
22:33 UTC
A better Best, Reddit in new languages, and more
Hey there redditors,
Since we last chatted before the July 4th break (or July 1st for those of you who celebrate Canada Day) we’ve launched some new initiatives to make Reddit more accessible to people around the world, improve and evolve your home feed, get notifications about communities you moderate, and much much more.
Here’s what’s new June 23rd–July 13th
Better than Best (sort)
There are lots of different sort options on Reddit—Hot, New Top, Controversial, Rising, and the very best of them all, the Best sort. The old Best sort used upvotes, downvotes, the age of posts, and how much time someone spent on a community to determine what posts to show first in your home feed. But even Best can be better, and now all redditors on mobile have an improved, more personalized Best sort in their home feed that uses machine learning algorithms to constantly evolve and improve what posts you see. Check out the original post to get into all the nitty gritty details about how the new Best sort works in your home feed.
In addition to helping surface posts from communities you may not visit all the time and improving what you see, one of the bigger changes you’ll notice is the way content is recommended:
Example of old recommendations compared to new ones
Previously, you’d see recommendations for communities you may like, now you’ll see recommendations for similar posts you may like. And you can also tap the “…” menu to respond to posts and improve your recommendations by saying Show more posts like this or Show fewer posts like this. The algorithm that populates your home feed Best sort will take your feedback into account right away and the next time you reload your home feed your feedback will be implemented.
Currently, this is out to all redditors on iOS and Android.
Reddit is available in new languages
As was announced earlier here in r/blog, to make Reddit more accessible to people and communities across the globe, Reddit’s interface (the buttons, menus, and other surfaces that you all see on the platform) is now available in German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. We’re rolling out these updates in iterative phases so this is just the beginning—future phases will include more product coverage, more languages, and further refinement of the translations themselves.
We’re still translating the core parts of Reddit that most people use every day, so you’ll probably see some areas of the product that aren’t translated or some awkward translations. If you do, help us out by commenting on this post or sending us your feedback via Modmail. (You can write to us in English or in your own language as the feedback will go directly to the translation team.) To learn more about how you can change your language and what’s next, check out the original post.
Blocking is more accessible across platforms
Previously, when you wanted to block someone, you either had to go to their profile on the Android or iOS app, or go to your account settings on www.reddit.com. Now, no matter what platform you’re on, you can block anyone from their profile or your user settings. (This includes old.reddit.com too.) Check out the How do I block someone? FAQ to get the step-by-step details.
A few small updates
Bugs, tests, and rollouts of features we’ve talked about previously
On all platforms
- Now you can easily share your avatar. Just create your avatar the way you always do, then hit the Share button and select Share this Avatar to get a link you can share wherever you’d like.
On Android and iOS
- Mod push notifications have been rolled out to 100% of mods and can be customized to each mod’s preferences. If you're a mod, just visit your notification settings and select which notifications you’d like to receive.
On Android
- The app won't crash while cropping a high res image for a community icon anymore.
- We brightened up the hard-to-see Play icon so you can see it against dark backgrounds.
On iOS
- Your font won’t change after typing an emoji now.
- Comments will stay collapsed after you leave a thread and then come back.
- The Add New Custom Feed button won’t overlap the custom feed screen anymore.
- The community tab won’t rotate unexpectedly in landscape mode anymore.
- The community icon won’t flicker during post creation anymore.
- The scroll comments “fast forward” button won’t overlay the reply button anymore.
- When you lock and unlock comment threads they show the right icon now.
- Custom feeds won’t crash when you’re viewing them offline anymore.
Thanks for listening! We’ll be sticking around to answer questions and hear feedback as usual. But for the next few updates, we’ll also be asking your thoughts about these updates themselves. Do you find them helpful? Would you like more information about long-term projects or better ways to give feedback? Fill out this quick survey to let us know what you think.
22:53 UTC
Introducing Reddit in new languages
Hello everyone,
I’m u/jleeky from the International team at LasesReddit and I’m here to give an update on some of the work we’re doing to bring Reddit to more people around the world [cue Daft Punk song].
As we continue to grow as a platform, we want to reflect the diverse users and communities across the globe. Part of this means making Reddit’s interface (the buttons, menus, and other surfaces that you all see on the platform) available in different languages.
Starting today, Android, iOS, and Desktop users will be able to access the first phase of our product translation in German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. We are taking an iterative approach towards supporting more languages—which means future phases will include more product coverage, more language coverage, and further refinement of our translations.
This is just the beginning.
We are still optimizing the language experience and are working to translate the core parts of Reddit that most people use every day—but we haven't caught everything. You will probably see some areas of the product that aren’t translated and you might see some awkward translations.
Please help us by leaving any feedback you have below, or reach out to us through modmail to report issues or let us know what you think! You can write to us in English or in your own language as the feedback will go directly to the translation team.
Changing your language
On Android
Go to your settings and navigate to ‘view options’ where you will find a new ‘Language’ setting.
The New Language Setting in Account Settings on Android
Once you click on this new option, you will be able to select from a list of available languages to switch the language of your Reddit interface.
Select Your Preferred Language
On Desktop
Go to your user settings and you will find the new ‘Language’ setting.
The New Language Setting on Desktop
For iOS
Go to your settings and navigate to ‘view options’ where you will find a new ‘Language’ setting.
The New Language Setting in Account Settings on iOS
Clicking on the language setting will link you to the app-specific language setting that’s part of your OS. When prompted, tap “Open Settings”.
Go to Reddit App Specific OS Settings to Change Your Language
In the app-specific settings screen, there will be a section for “Preferred Language”. Select the language and return to the app.
The Reddit Specific OS Settings on iOS
Note: For this to work, you may need to add English as a language option for your phone. (iOS Settings > General > Language & Region > Other Languages)
And that’s it! I’ll stick around to answer your questions and hear your thoughts.
18:20 UTC
New opportunities, discoveries, and updates from across the platform
ICYMI: Check out our post from earlier today on evolving the ‘Best’ sort for Reddit’s home feed.
Change comes in many different forms and so do the updates here in r/blog. This week we have a few updates to share about new features and tests, along with a retirement and some removals. Let’s dive in…
Here’s what’s new June 8th–June 22nd
New opportunities to create new communities
As was announced last week in r/modnews, starting today we’re removing a number of dormant communities and making their names available for future community creators. There are a number of communities on Reddit that get started but, for whatever reason, never really take off. Over the years, this has resulted in a large number of communities that have always been dormant or may have experienced a small amount of activity at one time but have become ghost towns. If you’ve ever tried to create a new community only to find the name you want taken by an inactive community, you know how frustrating that can be. But no more! This initiative will help make many of the names available again.
There will be two phases to this initiative, and communities must meet certain requirements/thresholds in order to be considered dormant and eligible for removal. (Learn about the requirements in the original post.) There are a lot of dormant communities (almost a million!) so it will take around two weeks to remove them, and you may be interested in some of the names up for grabs. If you’re into random stuff, good news―r/RandomStuff will soon be available. Do you think American cheese is the greatest?―r/AmericanCheese could be the place to connect with your fellow enthusiasts. But all kidding aside, we’re excited about the new namespace that’s becoming available and hope new creators will make the best of it. To learn all the nitty gritty details, check out the original r/modnews post or today’s update.
Testing a new way to discover communities
Starting this month, you may see a new tab on the Reddit iOS app called Discover. This new space has a few familiar features like a list of communities you follow, along with some new things such as a way to browse posts by topics and a scrollable feed with a mix of content. Here’s a preview:
Discover is a great place to go when you’re bored or looking to burst your bubble and find new things you may have never seen or interacted with before. This will be going out to 10% of redditors on iOS later this month, and will roll out to other platforms as we learn more and get feedback.
r/trendingsubreddits rides off into the sunset
Back in the day, trending subreddits on the front page was one of the only ways to find new communities. Today, there’s a trending communities leaderboard, personalized recommendations, improved onboarding for new redditors, and new ways to discover communities we’re testing like the Discover tab mentioned above. Because there are so many ways to find trending and new communities, the time has come to retire the r/trendingsubreddits community and any widgets that used its curated trends. If you want to check out the last few hand-selected communities (that were picked to celebrate this little community and all the other communities it helped put on redditors’ radars over the years), head on over to r/trendingsubreddits to check it out one last time.
A few small updates from the native apps
Bugs, tests, and tweaks…
On iOS
- Autocorrected words display correctly (with a blue underline) when the comment composer is expanded again.
- Now text posts have a link keyboard accessory.
- Fixed a bug that was showing an error message after people had successfully resent a message in chat.
On Android
- We’re testing a few different things to improve comment threads and make them easier to read through—moving the fast forward button (as some of you mentioned the other week, the default placement can be confusing); left aligning vote, award, and reply buttons; making it easier to expand collapsed threads, and truncating comments that are more than five lines long.
- Community user flair saves correctly again.
- If you download and save images to your phone while using Pie OS or older, your images will be saved to Photos instead of Photos/Reddit now.
22:25 UTC
Evolving the Best Sort for Reddit’s Home Feed
Hello Reddit!
Discovering communities on Reddit that you haven’t heard of before, or may not even know exist, is hard. You may enjoy r/photoshopbattles, but how would you know to search for related communities like r/birdswitharms or r/peoplewithbirdheads unless someone told you about them?
After 15+ years and millions of feedback comments, survey responses, customer interviews, and Mod Council conversations, we know that whether you’ve been here since the great Digg migration or because you heard about a little community called r/wallstreetbets, we want to help you find communities that you will love on Reddit. With that in mind, one of our biggest priorities is ensuring that you have a great experience on the platform and that it’s easy (and simple) for you to find the content you enjoy and communities where you belong.
We use the terms “simple” and “easy” above, but achieving this feat is anything but (and you’ve probably felt it at times). Redditors are an immensely diverse group that’s spread over a hundred thousand communities representing an amazing cross-section of all of the things that people love (as one of my favorite subreddits, r/WowThisSubExists, showcases). The challenge we face is creating ways for a huge range of people to find the things that appeal to their interests across a massive amount of content and communities.
Today, we’re going to tell you about our latest effort to make this easier for redditors: updating the Home feed on iOS and Android.
Evolving the Best Sort for Reddit Home Feed
When you open the Reddit app and navigate to Home, Reddit needs to determine which relevant posts to show you. To do this, Reddit’s systems build a list of potential candidate posts from multiple sources, pass the posts through multiple filtering steps, then rank the posts according to the specified sorting method. Over the years, we’ve built many options to choose from when it comes to sorting your Home feed. Here’s a look at how each sort option currently recommends content:
- “Hot” ranks using votes and post age.
- “New” displays the most recently published posts.
- “Top” shows you the highest vote count posts from a specified time range.
- “Controversial” shows posts with both high count upvotes and downvotes.
- “Rising” populates posts with lots of recent votes and comments.
- The old “Best” considers upvotes, downvotes, age of post, and how much a user spent on a subreddit.
Starting on June 28, all mobile users on Reddit will have an improved and more personalized Best sort that will use new machine learning algorithms to personalize the order in which you see posts. This will result in a ranking of posts that we think you’ll enjoy the most based on your Reddit activity such as upvotes, downvotes, subscriptions, posts, comments, and more. The other Home feed sorts such as Hot, New, and Top will not change. Below we’ll explain exactly what machine learning we’re using and how, so that you have transparency into these updates.
The process we use to create the new Best sort involves several steps, which we will talk about in detail later in the post:
- Creating an initial list of content you might enjoy (“candidate generation”),
- Removing stuff you shouldn’t have to deal with such as spam (“filtering”),
- Using machine learning to predict what you may or may not like (“predictions”),
- Sorting content according to those predictions and ensuring a level of diversity of content (“ranking”), and
- Giving you ways to let us know what’s working and what’s not, and to adjust your experience based on what you want to see more or less of (“feedback and controls”).
Best Sort Will Now Include Recommended Content Instead of Recommended Subreddits
Since 2017, we’ve been adding community recommendations to our feeds in an effort to help redditors find more relevant communities that they’re interested in subscribing to. We called these types of recommendations “Discovery Units,” but found that they weren’t efficient in connecting users to new and relevant communities. We heard your feedback that these Discovery Units felt like a distraction from your feed, and the recommendations themselves weren’t always great because of the more naive models behind them. Frankly, we’re not expecting anyone to be super upset to see them go, and as a result we will be phasing them out of the Home feed.
Instead, the new recommendations will be posts and look similar to any post from a community that you’ve already joined. However, there are some key differences. The first is that for every recommendation, we provide explanation and context as to why we’re showing you the recommendation. We don’t want you to be left wondering why you’re seeing a certain piece of content, and these contextual explanations are going to continue to improve alongside our commitment to transparency in how algorithms impact your Reddit experience. In the example below, you can see the post recommendation from r/animalsbeingderps with the contextual explanation that it’s similar to r/WeirdLookingDogs.
Example of old and new recommendations
Second, the new recommendations will also have a button for you to join the communities if you like the content and in the post overflow menu (aka “the three dots button”) you will be able to tell us if you like this content (show more posts like this) or if you don’t like it (show fewer posts like this). Our systems act on those controls right away which will affect your Home feed the next time you reload the page.
Under-the-Hood of Building Reddit’s Home Feed (read: Enough Overview, Gory Details!)
Now that we’ve shared an update for your Best Sort on Home feed, we’d like to dig into the nitty-gritty around how exactly we’re suggesting this “next generation” of content recommendations and what it will look like for users moving forward.
Candidate Post Generation
To find the best posts on Reddit for each user, we first scour all Reddit submissions from the past 24 hours, and filter it through criteria intended to tell us what each user might enjoy. Specifically, we surface candidate posts from:
- Community subscriptions: each community you’ve joined
- Similar communities: communities similar to those you have joined (currently we use semantic similarity)
- Onboarding categories: categories you said they were interested in during onboarding (like “Animals & Awws” or “Travel & Nature”)
- Recent communities: communities that the user visited in recent days
- Popular and geo-popular: Posts that are popular among all redditors, or among redditors in their local area (only if permitted in app settings)
To maintain a diverse selection of posts, we combine some content from all of these sources into a single long list of candidate posts the user might be interested in.
Filtering Criteria for Posts
Every post we show on Reddit must meet a quality and safety threshold, so on the Best Sort we remove posts from the list that we think might be:
- Spam, deleted, removed, hidden, or promoted
- Posts the user has already seen
- Posts from subreddits or topics that the user asked we show less of
- Posts the user has hidden
- Posts from authors the user has blocked
Machine Learning Model
Once the candidate posts have been filtered, we gather “features” for each candidate post. A feature is a characteristic about the post. Here are some of the features we use:
- Post votes: The number of votes on the post. The magic of Reddit is that it is primarily curated by redditors via voting. This remains at the core of how Reddit works.
- Post source: How we found this post (subscriptions, onboarding categories, etc.)
- Post type: The type of the post (text, image, video, link, etc.)
- Post text: The text of the post
- Subreddit: Which subreddit the post is from, and the ratings, topics, and activity in that subreddit (for more on Ratings and Topics read this).
- Post age: The age of the post (we value giving you a “fresh” Home feed)
- Comments: Comments and comment voting
- Post URL: The URL the post links to, if the post is a link post
- Post flairs: Flairs and spoiler tags on the post
We combine these features with:
- Recent subreddits: Subreddits where you spent time recently
- Interest topics: Topics we believe you might be interested in based on previous Reddit activity
- General location: if recommendations based on your general location are enabled in your personalization preferences, your IP address-based location
- Account age: The age of your account (for redditors who have been here for a longer time, our model emphasizes subscriptions over recommendations)
We then use a statistical model, created using machine learning, that takes all of these features as input and predicts for each post:
- View probability: the chance you might view the post or click through to read the post and its discussion
- Subscribe/unsubscribe probability: the chance that you might subscribe to the subreddit of the post, or unsubscribe from the subreddit
- Comment probability: the chance you might want to comment on the post
- Upvote/downvote probability: the chance you might upvote or downvote the post
- Watch probability: the chance you might watch the video (if it’s a video)
These probabilities give us a number of scores for each post. Some of these scores suggest that you might not like the post, such as the chance of unsubscribing or downvoting the post. Because you will only be interested in a fraction of the new posts on Reddit, we use these scores to try to put our best candidates first.
The Final Step: Ranking
Given these predictions, we now have the task of building a feed that is fun, useful, and just right for you. To do this, we choose posts from the list of candidates based on a score that is calculated by combining predictions for different actions. The probability of selecting a post is determined by its score (score-weighted sampling), so the highest scoring posts are more likely (but not guaranteed) to be chosen first. We’re experimenting with what feels right for Reddit’s Home feed, so the scores may play different roles for different redditors. As an example, we might score posts based on the chance of upvote and avoiding the chance of unsubscribing.
Our sampling procedure makes sure the feed is diverse, while still putting more of the content we think you’ll be most interested in earlier in the feed. The sampling also represents both our humility about all of this (we don’t really know exactly what you’re going to like) and our belief that just about all Reddit posts and discussions will be interesting to some redditors. We also make sure that if there are too many similar posts in a row, we move those posts apart, helping to ensure that every user gets a broader view of the best content that Reddit has to offer.
Transparency, Controls and Feedback
“Well I, for one, welcome fear our new robot overlords,” you may be thinking. How do we make sure Reddit is recommending the right stuff in Best Sort? Each of the posts we show (from your subscriptions or recommendations) and what action you take on them enables us to train a new machine learning model (if you’re interested in our Machine Learning platform, check out our recent post on the topic) so that we can show more relevant content in the future. When you upvote a post that we showed on Home, we learn more about what future posts that you might also upvote. When you ignore a post on Home, we learn from that too: you are less likely to upvote posts like that in the future.
The training for the Reddit model happens offline and is based on batches of posts that were shown to redditors and whether or not they took an action on those posts. We use open-source technology, including TensorFlow, to train this model, test it, and prepare it for use in ranking Best Sort.
Most importantly, we extensively test each of these new models, and the whole ranking procedure on carefully designed representative “test” sets of data that were not shown in training, and on ourselves as redditors (there are frequently big debates about what people do and don’t like about the current iteration that results in more fine-tuning). We perform rigorous analysis of every aspect of the model and use slow rollouts with very close inspection of model performance to scale.
We are particularly focused on making sure that our machine learning models and ranking changes are well-liked by redditors. On every rollout of a ranking change, we closely monitor positive and negative indicators that might be affected by ranking, including:
- Upvotes and downvotes
- Subscriptions and unsubscriptions
- Reports and blocks
- Comments and posts
- How many posts redditors visit in depth
- ...and many more metrics. And yes, we read the comments.
Because Reddit has a long history of paying attention to both positive and negative signals (such as downvotes), and because redditors are great at using downvotes to maintain high quality content that differentiates Reddit from others, monitoring these signals ensures that we meet the high expectations of quality posts that redditors expect when they scroll their feed.
And besides all of the work we do to make sure these things are working appropriately and safely, we continue to offer you explicit control here as well: if you don’t want a personalized feed you can use other Sorts such as New or Hot, and if you don’t want to see personalized recommendations then you can turn them off inside your profile settings on the app using the toggle for “Enable next-generation recommendations.”
What Now?
When we talk to redditors in all user groups - old, new, posters, “lurkers,” app users, etc., we hear that the new algorithm is doing a much better job surfacing the community subscriptions that maybe you forgot about or have been missing (and the stats from the experiments are very positive across different user groups, just two stats of many as an example: Post Detail Views - meaning people who click on a post and read it are up 5.4% per user and comments are up 4.4% per user -- both of these are great indicators of people seeing more relevant content). It’s actually been so effective at surfacing content more effectively that we’ve seen a slight uptick in unsubscriptions too as some people are seeing communities they had forgotten that they were subscribed to and are no longer interested in.
We’re going to continue to improve the Home feed experience for users, and this is just the first version that we are launching. We will be constantly updating and iterating on it to make it a more enjoyable experience for you, and we need your feedback to do it.
As exciting as this all is, and while ML-based methods can be very effective, they also carry a tremendous responsibility in using them: How do we avoid bias? How do we avoid people being manipulated by getting caught in filter bubbles?
One of our responses to this responsibility is that we are committed to maintaining transparency about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Hopefully you see a bit of that above as we’ve listed exactly how this system is working, but you should also expect to see more frequent posts about our technical and ethical choices on how we deploy ML so that you understand what’s happening, and how we’re aiming to help create Community and Belonging.
We welcome any feedback in the comments below and will stick around for a while to answer questions.
18:17 UTC
New web icons, a mobile moderation test, and a roundup of smaller updates and bug fixes
We’ve got a short set of updates this week, with a few fun things to share.
Here’s what’s new May 25th–June 8th
New icons on the web
Those of you using reddit.com may have noticed a slight change in the icons. Over the past several months, we’ve worked on updating the icons on web to do three main things:
- Improve accessibility
Previously, we relied on color to indicate on/off states, but the new icons sets also use contrasting outlines and fills to further differentiate on/off states.
- Improve interactions
We standardized and increased the size of the icons to make them easier to click.
- Improve the User Interface (UI)
When you visit Reddit, the main focus should be on the content, not the UI. The new fill states were designed to be less distracting so that the content of a page remains the main focus.
Here’s some examples of some new icons with their on/off states to look over:
Thanks to those of you who helped give feedback on earlier tests and get the icons to where they are today. This change is now live on 100% of non-moderating surfaces (we’re working on mod surfaces and icons separately), so if you see an old icon slip through or any bugs, let us know.
Experimenting with a new mobile moderation experience
As was announced over in r/modnews, we’re testing out a mod view where moderators can easily access their Mod Queue and a feed of the communities they moderate from the mobile app. This experiment is just a test to get information and feedback from mods about how it can be improved. If you have thoughts or ideas, add your comments to the post.
A few more things…
Bugs, small updates, and tests across various platforms.
On all platforms
- If you signed up with an email but haven’t verified your email address yet, you’ll get a reminder email to finish the process.
On the web
- Now you can use quick commands in chat. Pressing the Return key will send your chat message and Shift + Return will add a line break.
On the mobile web
- The styling of the navigation menu has been updated and some of the navigation items in the About Reddit section have been reorganized.
On iOS
- Fixed a bug where the screen was blinking while adding text in a post title.
- Image thumbnails in crossposts that are tagged as NSFW or with a spoiler will blur properly again.
- You can post image galleries to your profile now.
On Android
- To help people find more posts and content they may be interested in, there’s a test showing related posts below comments. This has already been tested on iOS and now we’re bringing it to Android.
- The updated video player is out to 100% of redditors on Android.
- Fixed a crash that occasionally happened while you were tapping a post or comment.
21:53 UTC
New updates to help moderators, your monthly avatar gear drop, the follower list rollout, and small tests and bug fixes
Another week and another round of updates. This week, we have some changes to help moderators and a few small tests and fixes to share. So let’s get to it…
Here’s what’s new May 12th–May 24th
New updates to help moderators
If you’ve spent any time over r/modnews recently, you know that over the past year we’ve been focused on improving the quality of life for moderators by shipping a series of updates and new features to reduce harassment, make mod tools easier to understand, and close the parity gap between web and mobile. (To see the full list of what’s changed, check out the most recent post.)This week we had two updates that addressed direct feedback from mod teams:
- Changes to moderator push notifications
Last week, we updated Mod push notifications based on moderator feedback we got on the initial launch. Now there are more notification types that mods requested, more customization for when a notification gets sent, and some fancy pants automation to help mods get the right notification based on the size of their community. To learn more and get all the details, check out this r/modnews post.
- Typing indicators for Modmail
As was announced last Thursday, moderators can now tell when another one of their co-mods is drafting a response to a specific piece of Modmail. This was a small request from mods and means they can save time and make sure multiple mods aren’t replying to the same message.
We'll also take this chance to once again remind any mods who are reading this, that legacy Modmail is leaving us in June. Now that the new Modmail service has a superior feature set, we’ll be deprecating the legacy Modmail service. To learn more, check out the original announcement.
The ability to view and manage your followers is rolling out on Android and iOS
On Android, we’ve been testing the ability to view and manage your follower list and expect this change to fully roll out this week. On iOS, we’ll also start testing this week, with full rollout planned for mid-June. We’ll begin working on bringing this feature to the web in the next couple of months.
For more information on how followers will work, check out the original announcement in r/changelog.
New avatar gear to rock out in
Style your avatar for festival season, check out the new assortment of musical instruments and accessories, or funkify your look with new gear inspired by musicians and pop stars rolling out today and tomorrow.
It’s the little things...
Bugs, small fixes, and tests across various platforms.
On iOS:
- To help people find more posts and content they may be interested in, there’s a test showing related posts below comments.
- Fixed a crash that occurred while opening third-party GIFs in theater mode.
- Fixed a bug where community rules weren’t displaying consistently across different experiences.
On Android:
- We’re testing letting old notifications expire after 24 hours.
- Fixed a bug where the recently visited communities carousel was showing communities you've dismissed if you refreshed your feed.
- Fixed a bug where .gif and .jpg files weren’t downloading/saving correctly on some devices.
Rolling out to more platforms:
- The avatar closet is being tested on all platforms now.
20:36 UTC
Testing, testing… GIFs in chat, following specific threads, and recently viewed communities
https://reddit.com/link/na6ptn/video/m3qra75ovjy61/player
Hey there redditors, it’s another week and another set of updates. We’ve got some fun things like GIFs in chat going out, but also some more fundamental things we’re testing to make Reddit work better and more efficiently.
Here’s what’s new April 28th–May 11th
GIFs are coming to chat
Whether you want to tease a friend, react to something funny, or show your current mood, the ability to share GIFs gives you more to work with while chatting it up with your fellow redditors. Starting today, we’re testing allowing redditors on the web, iOS, and Android to share GIFs in their chats. Those in the test will see a new GIF button that looks like this:
And similar to how chat messages work, images and GIFs in chats can also be reported and removed.
Updates on specific posts and comment threads
If you want to follow what’s happening with a single post or comment thread, we’re testing a new type of notification that lets you do just that. Those in the test can tap either a notification/bell icon or the “…” overflow menu on a post or comment to get notifications on new activity.
Redditors can get notifications on as many posts or threads as they’d like, opt out of updates at any time, and notifications will also automatically expire after a week. One caveat is that only 1,000 people can opt in to a single post or comment at one time, so this is an extremely limited test on desktop now and will roll out to a small number of people on Android in two weeks. If we see that this is something redditors find useful, we’ll explore expanding the number of people who can follow a single piece of content before rolling out further.
A quick way to find communities you’ve recently visited
To make it easier for users to get to the communities they’ve been to recently, we’re testing a new feature that shows a small carousel of communities they’ve recently visited at the top of their home feed. The goal is to see if having a fast way to access these communities is more helpful then going through a community subscription list or search.
A few more things that require less explanation
Bugs, small fixes, and tests across various platforms.
On web:
- Moderators using Modmail will see a message indicator telling them when there’s a new message.
On iOS:
- Images won’t go missing when you create a gallery post now.
On Android:
- We’re testing some more variations of simplifying what information we show on posts when they’re in your feed that we introduced in an earlier update, including showing display names.
- After making changes based on the iOS test, the new video player is rolling out to Android.
- Over the next couple of weeks, we’re testing automatically removing notifications if someone hasn’t interacted with them for 24 hours. (This one is a pretty small test, so you may not see it for a while.)
- If you visit Reddit from a push notification from one of your alt accounts, you can still switch to another alt once you get into the app.
- The navigation in the side profile drawer works no matter what screen you’re on now.
- After you create a brand new community, you’ll be taken to that community’s home screen again.
On all platforms:
- Later this week we’ll be testing the performance of the new video player for a couple hours to make sure it doesn’t break under pressure.
- Redditors creating a community won’t have to assign it a topic right away.
And another reminder for all you mods out there, legacy Modmail is leaving us in June
Now that the new Modmail service has a superior feature set, we’ll be deprecating the legacy Modmail service in June. To learn more, check out the original announcement and keep an eye out for more updates here and in r/modnews.
20:23 UTC
Control over your followers, spring avatar gear, a sneak peek into new audio talks, a heads up on API changes, and a... doge head
https://reddit.com/link/mzse3p/video/xjqq5ahmrqv61/player
As you can see from our snazzy new video, we’ve got a lot of updates to share, ranging from the fun to the functional, long-awaited features to the new and experimental. So let’s dive in!
Here’s what’s new April 14th–April 27th
The ability to view and manage your followers is coming soon
As was announced in r/changelog yesterday, this May, redditors will have the ability to view and manage their existing followers list. These updates have been a long time coming and a lot of you have been asking for this for a while, so thanks for your feedback. We’re excited to finally make this change happen. Here’s a peek of what it will look like:
As you can see above, when you visit your profile, there’ll be a link under your description that shows you the number of followers you have and takes you to a searchable list of those followers (in order from your newest to your oldest followers). From there you can choose to follow someone back or visit their profile to learn more about them and take other actions such as blocking or messaging them. And along with announcing this upcoming change, we recently updated how blocking works—now if you block someone they’ll lose the ability to follow you and will automatically be removed from your followers list if they were already.We’ve also heard feedback that some redditors would like to opt-out of letting people follow them altogether. So this functionality will be added during phase two of this rollout, which we plan to ship over the next few months.
A sneak peek at Reddit Talk, a new feature for hosting live audio conversations
Currently, communities can use text threads, images, videos, chats, and live streams to have conversations and hang out with each other. While these are great mediums, there are other times (like when you’re hosting an Q&A or AMA, debating a live event, giving a lecture, or just having casual conversations) where having a live audio talk may be more useful or more fun. To create this new way for redditors to communicate with each other, we’re partnering with interested moderators to explore how audio talks can create cool experiences for their communities.
https://i.redd.it/6wotzgv0rqv61.gif
To get a more detailed walk-through of how Reddit Talk will work head over to the announcement on r/modnews, and if you’re a moderator or someone interested in getting early access sign up on the waitlist.
Help your avatar stay hydrated, hit the beach, or take a hike—Spring avatar gear is here
Inspired by spring and summer pursuits celebrated by many of our Reddit communities, there’s a new batch of avatar gear for those who love the outdoors, birdwatching, hiking, or hanging out at the pool or beach. And if you think Earth Day should be every day, there are some fun Earth Day inspired tees for you as well.
And as a special bonus to capitalize on current events, if you have Reddit Premium, you can also turn your avatar’s face into a giant doge head. (And non-Premium doge supporters can get a cool doge onesie.) Check out your profile or reddit.com/avatar to update your look.
Testing out a new perk for Reddit Premium members—a closet for your avatar gear
Lots of avatar gear is seasonal, so to see if Reddit Premium members are interested in saving their favorite ski pants or Santa hat all summer long, we’re testing letting them save up to 50 items in their closet. As part of this update, the avatar builder is getting a new look too, which will also be rolling out over the course of the next several weeks.
A heads up for moderators and robots—the post API is changing
Over a year ago we launched post requirements—a feature that allows mods to create detailed (you guessed it) post requirements for their communities such as required post flair, banned links from specific domains, restrictions on post length, and more. At the time, we also announced that post requirements will eventually be enforced across all platforms including the API. That day has come, and the update to POST /api/submit will officially take place on April 27, 2021. After this update, any third-party apps, scripts, or bots that haven’t been updated will start to fail. So to prevent this from happening, mods and developers should double-check that their error handling/display code works with the new error by following the instructions in this post. For more information, and to hear more about ongoing efforts to create less work for mods and share your on over to the r/modnews announcement.
A miscellaneous section of updates, for which there is no cool name
- Now, new redditors can create communities too. The karma and age restrictions for creating a community have been lifted.
- If you’ve been seeing the “You’re doing that too much,” too much, you may start seeing it less. We’ve made a few changes to better identify spammers and banned users, so that we can lessen the restrictions for redditors who are simply commenting and posting at top speeds.
Bugs and small fixes
Here’s what’s up with the native apps.
iOS updates and fixes:
- Changing your password won’t automatically log you out anymore
- When you choose to open links in your default browser, we’ll use what you've set up in your iOS14 app system settings
- The header won’t reappear while scrolling through comments on a user’s profile anymore
- Crossposting without a network connection won’t crash the app anymore
- You’ll see thumbnails (instead of black boxes) while using the media picker during post creation again
- Media galleries respect community defaults for hiding media thumbnails again
Android updates and fixes:
- If your device is running Android Pie or older, downloaded media will save to the "Pictures" directory instead of "Pictures/Reddit" now
- Fixed a bug to show more detailed error messages while making an image post
- Adjusted comment buttons and post buttons in compact mode to be a bit smaller
- Items in a poll can wrap over more than one line now
And that’s it for this week. We’ll be hanging around to answer questions and hear your thoughts. Happy Tuesday y’all!
16:30 UTC
You want a better Reddit search? Ok, we’re on it. Learn about upcoming search improvements, recent mod tool updates, notification tests, and more
Happy Tuesday redditors. It’s that time again—we’ve got new features, updates, and even a sneak peek of what we’re working on for Reddit search.
Here’s what’s new March 30th–April 13th
Big improvements for Reddit search are on the way, and we want your help
As was announced in r/changelog, we’re focusing on creating a better search experience this year by more than doubling the number of people working on improving search and creating an entirely new team solely devoted to search experiences.
Over the past few months, the Search team has been creating a search experience that can support the millions of posts, communities, and people that make up the Reddit platform (aka working on infrastructure). Now that the foundation is in place, the next phase is improving search in ways that deliver better results and help redditors find the content they’re looking for faster.
This will include:
- Redesigning the search results UI from top to bottom
- Improving our understanding of query intent, so even if someone types something different than what they’re looking for, we can still surface relevant results
- Including suggestions for misspelled searches (also known as spellcheck)
- Improving post ranking algorithms so all results are more relevant
- Improving searching within a community on desktop
- Making better search suggestions as you type in the search bar
- Enabling you to search comments
But this list is incomplete… what else should be on it? To get to a truly effective search experience, we’d like to hear more from redditors. Take this quick survey to let us know what you think of Reddit search, what is and isn’t working for you, and how you think we can make it better.
Helping new moderators set up their communities
Creating a new community can be tricky and confusing for first-time moderators, so we’ve created some step-by-step tips that help new moderators set up and start to grow their communities. The steps include things like adding a welcome message, making a sticky post, or sharing your community. Steps are by no means requirements to create and mod a community, but provide brand new mods with some guidance to get their community up and running. Right now the feature is live with 30% of new communities on the web, and will be rolling out to 30% of iOS new community creators this week and 30% of new Android community creators in early May.
Improving notifications, episode IV
As part of the ongoing effort to improve notifications (see previous updates for episodes I, II, and III), we’re testing a new change that’s like air traffic control, only for push notifications. To improve the frequency that redditors receive notifications (aka to make sure active redditors aren’t bombarded with too many of them), we’re testing out sending fewer notifications based on how many notifications someone has received in the last 24 hours or how long it’s been since their last notification. This test is only temporary, to see if redditors find it helpful.
Rolling out to more platforms and more redditors
A few things we’ve shared in previous updates are coming to more platforms and rolling out to more people.
- The new and improved avatar builder has rolled out to the web, Android, and iOS
- Now visitors to the mobile website can sign up via a magic link (a link we send to your email) just like iOS, Android, and the web
- An updated inbox on desktop is rolling out to 95% now
Bugs and small fixes
Here’s what’s up with the native apps:
Android:
- You can roll over someone's username to start a chat with them again
- Videos won’t automatically unmute for a moment when you start playing them anymore
iOS:
- Moving forward, we’ll only support iOS 13.0 and above
- Now you can double tap on images to zoom in to them
- The “Add new Custom Feed" button doesn’t overlap other elements on the custom feed screen anymore
- Saving a video post won’t freeze the video anymore
That’s all for this week. Let us know what you think (we know you will), and ask any questions you may have.
22:03 UTC
Video player’s gonna play, Modmail’s looking good these days, and this new avatar gear is super fresh
Hey there r/blog crew. It’s time for another fortnightly update and we’ve got a lot to share this week. Check out what’s new and share your thoughts, ideas, and feedback below. A lot of this week’s updates were based off of the community’s comments here in r/blog, r/ideasfortheadmins, and across Reddit in places like r/modnews, r/changelog, and more. So keep letting us know what you think and we’ll keep letting you know what we’re thinking too.
Here’s what’s been happening March 17th–March 30th
Play on, video player
Since our last update about improving Reddit’s video player, many of you here and in r/changelog have given some great feedback about what you’d like to see, and this week a new round of changes based on your requests is going out.
With the new changes, you’ll be able to:
- Watch videos using a chrome-free viewing experience (that means you can remove the video controls and buttons that overlay the video).
- Access comments quickly and easily—no more having to tap twice.
- Swipe right on a video to quickly get back to the feed you were in.
- Tap into a video and keep the same audio controls you were using previously.
This will go out to a small group of redditors on iOS over the next few days and will ramp up more depending on the feedback and performance. Thanks to those of you who gave feedback on the player so far.
What’s next for video…
In addition to today’s updates, a few other things the community has brought up are in the works, such as allowing redditors to download videos directly, GIFs with sound, and adding more video editing tools. So stay tuned for more improvements!
Superheroes, more curly hairstyles, and a wheelchair—new avatar gear is here!
Since our last update, there have been some pretty big gear drops. Now, you can turn yourself into all kinds of superheroes (powered by fire, water, or just a bath towel cape and a spray bottle); update your ‘do with new hairstyles made for curly, textured hair; or set your avatar up with a wheelchair so it’s a better representation of who you are. Check out some of the new looks:
The superhero gear is live now and new hairstyles and the wheelchair are going out today (so depending on what platform you’re on, you may have to wait a bit to see the newest stuff). Thanks to those of you who have made requests for gear and a very special shout out to the redditor who came up with the amazing curly hairstyles you see above and advocated for them in r/curlyhair and r/ideasfortheadmins. Got more ideas? Let us know what else you’d like to see in the comments!
Ongoing improvements to Modmail
If you’re a regular over at r/modnews, you may have seen that the communication system mods use, lovingly referred to as Modmail, got a slew of new features and improvements last week. Now moderators with Modmail permissions can:
- Perform bulk actions such as highlighting, marking items as read/unread, and archiving multiple messages at once. (Heads up—this has been rolled back as we work on a bug fix, but will be back soon.)
- Manage the memberships of private communities by approving or ignoring join requests from a new, dedicated folder.
- See response indicators, that let them know if another mod has responded to or started to respond to a message they’re viewing already.
What’s next for Modmail…
Now that the new Modmail service has a superior feature set, we’ll be deprecating the legacy Modmail service in June. Then, during the second half of the year, moderators will also be able to access their Modmail from mobile. To learn more, check out the original announcement and keep an eye out for more updates here and in r/modnews in the months ahead.
A new option to add gender identity during account sign up
In order to help people who are completely new to Reddit find communities and content they enjoy more quickly, new users will now have the option to add their gender identity to their account during signup. The new opt-in prompt will include a variety of options, including a free-form field, and the ability to skip the step altogether. Here’s what it looks like:
Redditor’s gender identity selections will never be publicly displayed, but will be used along with other things they select during signup (such as topics they’re interested in) to improve the community recommendations they see in their feeds. In addition, people can also change or remove this information from their settings at any time. To learn more, check out the original post and conversation over in r/changelog.
A new-to-some-redditors option to share what topics they’re interested in
If you haven’t visited the app in a while, you’ll be asked to share what topics you're into to improve what community recommendations you see. This test is starting out on Android, and will roll out to more platforms if we’re seeing positive engagement.
Bugs and small fixes
Just a few small things you may have missed on the native apps.
iOS updates:
- GIFs that don’t have sound don’t have a mute button anymore
- Reddit hosted GIFs will correctly loop by default again
- If there’s an error updating your online status, an error toast will let you know
- You can refresh News tab without crashing the app now
- Avatars are displayed correctly when you’re logged out again
Android updates:
- Now you can access shortcuts by long pressing the Reddit icon on your device
- The moderator list in mod tools correctly displays the list of moderators you can edit again
- Attribution on post images is working correctly again
Phew, and that’s it for today, everyone. We’ll be sticking around to answer questions and hear your thoughts and ideas.
21:13 UTC
Online status controls, a new display for user flair, and more notification improvements
Another Tuesday and we’re back with new updates and things to share. Let’s get to it!
Here’s what went out March 2nd–March 16th
Online presence indicators that redditors have full control over
The other week we announced a new feature that gives redditors the option to share their online status. Our hope is that this feature makes it easier for redditors to connect and start conversations with each other and makes it more clear when people are around to take part in real-time discussions in comment threads. After revealing the prototype, we received a lot of feedback from users who were concerned about how sharing their online status might affect their privacy and safety. (Thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts.) We hear you, and want to share the privacy and safety considerations that have been built into this feature, as well as some of the changes we’ve made based on your feedback to the prototype:
- If you don’t want to share your online status, you can disable the feature from any platform (the native apps, mobile web, old Reddit, and new Reddit). To turn off Online Status on the mobile web, the native apps, and new Reddit go to your profile and tap the Online Status button below your avatar. On old.reddit.com, go to the privacy options section of your preferences, uncheck Let others see my online status, then click save options.
- When you turn off Online Status, people won’t see any status for you at all—not even an indicator saying that you’re offline or that you’ve selected Off.
- Accounts that you’ve blocked will never see your online status. Additionally, if an account is banned from a community, they won't be able to see the online status of anyone in that community.
- Thanks to your feedback, we also changed the language used on the Online Status controls. Instead of your status saying you’re either Online or Hiding, now it will more clearly communicate that this feature is either on or off with the language Online Status: On or Online Status: Off. If you select Off, nobody will be able to see your status or know that you’ve selected that option—only you will see that your status is off.
Here’s what the updated status and controls will look like:
All redditors have the option to turn the feature on or off now. However, the online indicator (the green dot on users’ avatars shown above) isn’t visible to other users yet. Starting this week, 10% of Android users will begin to see the online status of users who have the feature turned on. All the feedback we’ve received was appreciated and we’d love to hear what you think of the updates we’ve made.
We need to talk about your user flair
Communities love their flair, and use it in both practical and creative ways. So to better highlight user flair within comment threads and to fix the issue where longer user flair often gets cut off on mobile, we’re testing out a new display on Android and iOS. If you compare the before and after images below you’ll see that community-specific user flair has its own line under the username; moderator, admin, and OP icons are now text-based; and colors have been updated so that the user flair looks less like a link and more like the flair it was meant to be. This will go out to a very small percentage of users at first, and will roll out slowly based on feedback from communities.
Improving notifications, episode IV
A new hope for post notifications! Since the original rollout of the updated notifications inbox, we’ve gone over updates to the UI, new settings, and improved recommendations for trending and recommended posts. Today, we’re continuing that work with improved post previews in the activity section of your inbox. Now, instead of only seeing the post title, you’ll see an embedded post with more information. Here’s what it looks like:
This will be going out to a small test of users on both Android and iOS.
Bugs and small fixes
Just a few small things you may have missed on the native apps:
iOS bug fixes:
- Image thumbnails show on pending posts again
- The A–Z scroller on the Communities screen works again
Android update:
- It’s easier to see the downvote color in Dark Mode now
That’s it for today folks. We’ll be sticking around to answer questions and hear your ideas and feedback. Have a great rest of your day and a Happy St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow!
19:34 UTC
Welcome messages, a better way to build your avatar, and default muting for videos
Hope you’ve had a good couple of weeks since our last post. It’s been a fortnight and now we’re back with another update on what we’ve been working on. Check it out, then let us know what’s on your mind.
Here’s what went out February 17th–March 2
A new way to welcome new community members
Moderators have had the ability to create a direct message to welcome new members to their communities for a while, and now they can also set up a custom message to welcome new members right away. Here’s what it looks like on the web and mobile:
This is being tested with 30% of redditors on mobile and desktop, and is available to all mods. Also, just like previous welcome messages, you can opt out of seeing these in your notification settings. To learn more head on over to the r/modnews announcement to ask questions and let us know what you think.
Soon it’ll be easier than ever to outfit your avatar
We’re testing a new avatar builder so you can smoothly scroll through selections and see all the latest gear. Also we’ll be introducing a new banner in your sidebar so you’ll never miss out on new avatar gear drops. Check out the preview:
Also, someone mentioned a while back that they’d love a beanie, and now we’ve got one.
Better muting for videos
As part of our ongoing work to create a universal video player, we’ve gotten some great feedback about how redditors would like us to handle audio controls, and specifically muting, on the platform. We’ve made a round of updates to the various video players on the Reddit iOS app to smooth out the audio experience. With this change:
- Every Reddit video player will have a mute button.
- Videos are muted by default, until you unmute them.
- When you unmute a video, it will unmute all videos in the app for the duration of your session. Similarly, when you mute a video, it will mute all videos in the app until you choose to unmute one. Unless you have Quiet Audio Mode turned on—then all videos will always be muted by default.
- If a video doesn’t have sound, the mute button will have a slash through it so you know it doesn’t have sound.
- If you’re listening to audio on a different app, your sound will play unless you unmute a video. After you’ve finished watching the video, your background audio will go back on.
We’re testing this first on iOS, and if it looks (and sounds...haha, because audio) like an improvement, we’ll roll it out further.
Bugs and small fixes
Here’s what else is up with the native apps.
iOS updates and fixes:
- Search terms won’t overlap with the “Clear” button in the search bar now
- You can tell when a direct message is from a moderator or a Reddit admin now
- Posts will filter the right way while using r/popular for a specific region again
- Comments won’t collapse by default now
Android updates and fixes:
- Refreshing feeds works again
- Community tabs render correctly with increased font sizes again
As always, we’ll be around to answer any questions. Have a great two weeks and we’ll see you two Tuesdays from now!
17:06 UTC
Simplified posts, feature glow ups, and continued notification work
Between winning the Superbowl (hey, The New York Times said it, not us), getting a 35% increase in traffic thanks to a certain investment community some of you may have heard of, and our awesome new Lunar New Year avatar gear we decided to show off in our snazzy new banner; we had a big couple of weeks. And, as if that wasn’t enough, we’ve also got a lot of fun stuff to share with you today.
Here’s what went out February 2nd–February 16th
Simplicity in all posts
Last year, we simplified what posts look like in redditor’s feeds on the mobile web and iOS. Not only did this look nice, but it also helped increase how often people click-through to read posts and interact in communities. By focusing the attention on the information that matters the most, people were better able to engage with content and each other. This week, we’re introducing a new simplified post design on Android too.
The changes are subtle, so here’s a before and after:
Along with more consistent icons and colors, we’ve also simplified the way a post’s details display and removed any unnecessary copy or information. We’re testing four different variants at 5% each on Android and will adjust the design based on what we learn.
Glowing up
It was about time for a few of these experiences that have been on Reddit for a while to get a fresh new look.
- Reddit Premium
Since we’ve recently added new Reddit Premium features like custom app icons and exclusive avatar gear, we’ve updated our Premium informational page to reflect the changes. It also includes some lovely new art. Check it out:
- Daily Digest emails
Those of you who’ve opted in to receiving Reddit’s Daily Digest emails will notice that your roundup of trending and top posts also has a new look. We’ve added more information about the posts, including images, so they’re easier to scan. Here’s an example:
- Icons on the web
We’re updating our icons to be more clear and consistent. As we make updates we’ll be testing out the different variants with 10% of web users at a time to make sure they make sense, look good, and are more effective at representing the actions they need to. Here's another before and after for you:
Improving notifications, episode III
In previous posts, we went over some of the UI updates and improvements we made after the original rollout of our new notifications inbox. Today, we’re continuing that work by making the system for sending notifications better, smarter, and faster.
- A big part of improving notifications is improving what communities and posts you see. Previously we only used a few signals to decide what communities and content we recommended, such as whether or not you subscribed to or recently viewed a community. Now we’re taking more into account, such as how many other notifications you’ve recently received from that community (how novel!), or how often you engage with communities about the same topic. We’ll be testing these changes slowly over time, and tweaking what signals we use as we learn more about what works best.
- For those who have trending and recommendations notifications turned on, we’re also running a test to improve what communities we recommend by significantly widening the selection of communities we choose from. We’re expanding our recommended communities from a few hundred to several thousand in order to add more variety.
Removing porn from r/all
After hearing from multiple redditors over the years (including recent feedback from some of you who like to read these posts), we’ve learned that unexpectedly stumbling across sexually explicit content is jarring and uncomfortable for a lot of people. Starting this week, sexually explicit content won't be shown in the r/all feed. If you’d like to learn more about the decision and join in the conversation, check out the r/changelog post that went out last week and share your thoughts.
Some miscellaneous things you may not have noticed
- People have asked for avatar gear that reflects current events, so we’ve added fun gear for the Lunar New Year. There are free and Premium versions, so go style your avatar and keep an eye out for more gear around current events and holidays.
- We’re running a small test on iOS and Android to ask people who vote, comment, or post in communities they’re not members of yet if they’d like to join those communities.
- If you’ve paid for a Reddit Premium subscription, there are new custom app icons.
Rolling out to new platforms
A few features that were mentioned in previous updates are rolling out to new platforms now.
- “Silent notifications”—notifications that go to your phone, but don’t interrupt any windows/apps you have open or play sound—are going to Android.
- Profile images and avatars in comment threads are rolling out to iOS.
- The ability to sign up or log in to your account with a magic link is now available on the web.
Bugs and small fixes
Here’s what’s up with the native apps:
iOS updates and fixes:
- All the avatars in chat will show up as circles not squares
- The spacing around predictions in r/Predictor looks much better now
Android updates and fixes:
- If you get a loading error, we let you know what happened and provide you with a button to retry
- When you open a group chat you can scroll to see all the members now
And last, but definitely not least… Reddit’s 2020 Security Transparency Report is out now
For those of you who don’t follow r/redditsecurity, today’s a great day to head over and check it out. Every year, Reddit publishes a transparency report to give the Reddit community a comprehensive, statistical look into what content was removed from Reddit, why content was removed, what actions were taken against accounts that violated Reddit’s Content Policy, and much more. Check out the post, then ask questions and join the discussion happening now.
And that’s all folks! We’ll be around to answer your product questions and hear feedback and thoughts.
00:20 UTC
Sorry we crashed your SuperbOwl party
00:26 UTC
Diamond Hands on the Data 💎🙌📈
Hey there redditors!
In case you’ve been living under a rock or didn’t see the rockets firing off for Pluto, r/WallStreetBets has had quite a week, uncovering sources of deep value. Since things are moving fast, and there’s a lot of “detailed” analyses and data flying around, we figured it was a good time to share some notable user activity and traffic insights pertaining to what we’ve been seeing over the last week.
First off, here’s what Reddit’s platform traffic has looked like over the last week, with the week before for comparison, in arbitrary Reddit traffic units.
Site-wide week over week traffic growth. Blue is last week. Red is this week.
Over the past 15 years, we’ve become well seasoned when it comes to scaling up and mitigating ever increasing volumes of traffic. And, though we’ve employed the tricks of the trade with autoscaling, seeing a >35% uptick in sustained peak traffic in one day is decidedly not normal.
[Huge props to our Infrastructure and SRE teams (who are hiring) for HODLing and keeping this particular rocket flying during last week and minimizing the few interruptions we did have.]
Unsurprisingly, this is mostly due to a giant influx of users to r/WallStreetBets, which has shown a slight but noticeable uptick in traffic:
Views of r/WallStreetBets by hour for the last few weeks.
Notably between January 24th-30th, there was a 10x increase of new users viewing r/WallStreetBets. So, importantly, we now have a much better notion internally of “market hours” that we can track. We also found a way to track the time of the closing bell. There is one particular user (who we will leave up to speculation) whose profile page sparked especially high interest when trading ended on Monday. This particular user has so many awards, loading their page identified some bugs in how we’re handling representing awards and was causing stability issues. Here’s what that traffic looked like:
Spot the anomaly. It's subtle.
“Hot new community has traffic surge” is at best a tautology, so let’s spend a minute looking at the impact of that surge in r/WallStreetBets. Since the community has been highly visible on and off Reddit for the last week, one would expect to see its effect on sign-ups. The below graph illustrates what percentage of new Reddit users had viewed r/WallStreetBets on their first day during the month of January:
New Reddit user activity during January 2021.
This isn’t terribly surprising given how much external attention and news there has been about r/WallStreetBets and Reddit. Although r/WallStreetBets received an anomalous surge of traffic, the composition of the traffic is pretty anomalous free. This looks like a bunch of new users trying to engage in the community versus a new and awful surplus of “bots.” Over the past week alone, we’ve seen millions of people coming to Reddit and signing up to become new users (2.6x growth week over week). The fact that so many users decided to do this in such a short period of time is the amazing part.
And of course, the fun wasn’t just from new users. The r/WallStreetBets community was also front and center across many of our feeds and has continued to maintain that position over the past week:
Dealing with all of this immediate attention can prove to be challenging, so major props to the mod team for diamond-handling such a huge surge of users. In fact, the community has significantly increased by 5.6 million users over the past two weeks. The moderators were on overdrive during this period. The community’s default set of rules imposes limits on the behaviors of new users (something we all know is pretty common in the larger communities) and so together with a surge of content being created in r/WallStreetBets, we saw a similar surge of removals on the same timeline:
Content removal split across admin actions and the various flavors of moderator tools.
The volume of content removals seems drastic, but keep in mind that it’s also the point. It takes new users a bit of time to figure out the style and...mores of how to interact on Reddit. Not all content is original, and unfortunately (as I find out myself more often than not), someone might have been faster to the joke that you just came up with than you were. Oh, and there can only be one true “first” in a comment thread…
That’s not to say nothing got through. Quite the contrary! Let’s take a look at what was being talked about:
Most popular stocks discussed across Reddit for the last month.
Which is to say that GME has been a persistent topic for quite a long time indeed and its prevalence has scaled up as traffic on r/WallStreetBets has scaled. Near the recent peak, it looks like diversification into AMC started to pick up, followed by a brief foray into silver (unfortunately not Reddit silver). This graph doesn’t show sentiment, however, and after a brief speculative discussion into the intrinsic value of precious metals, the community spoke up and then doubled-down on fundamentals, meaning the vast majority of those silver posts are anti-silver.
Well that’s what we have for now. I have some time for the next hour to stick around and answer questions. Suffice it to say it’s been an interesting and exciting week, and I’m glad to be able to try to distill it down into a small pile of graphs.
20:36 UTC
A new video player, updated email designs, mobile community settings, and an exciting new sidevote (award)
Welcome back (or welcome for the first time) r/blog readers! Today we’re happy to share the beginning of one of our bigger initiatives, updates and iterations on features we’ve rolled out in previous posts, and new changes we haven’t shared with you yet.
Here’s what went out January 20th–February 2nd
The first step towards improving video on Reddit
Redditors have been asking for an improved native video experience on Reddit for some time, and yesterday in r/changelog we announced the first of many efforts to make watching, sharing, and creating videos on Reddit an easy and enjoyable experience. Using the advanced performance of the Reddit live streaming (also known as the RPAN/Reddit Public Access Network) video player as a foundation, we’re building and testing a new video player and feed that allows you to view videos on demand in a full-screen experience.
Here’s what it looks like today:
As we work on improving the new player, we’re asking redditors to help identify any UI or performance bugs and let us know what is and isn’t working for them. We ran an initial test last week, that we’ve turned off after we received early feedback from the community. With help from redditors’ in the test, we’ve already identified some good fixes (such as starting video in the player where you left off watching in the feed) that will be going out in the upcoming weeks, and gathered some great feedback (like that people don’t need to see the title or the right column of action items/buttons for the whole duration of the video) that we’ll be exploring options for.
After iterating on the design and improving/tuning the player performance more, we’ll be rolling out to 2% of users on iOS and Android to gather more feedback and continue to iterate in the weeks ahead. This is the first of many steps to make watching videos on Reddit a more enjoyable experience, and as we learn more and gather more feedback, we’ll be updating you on the progress and learnings along the way. To get more information and join in the conversation, head over to the r/changelog post and let us know what you think.
Continuing our work on improving notifications
In our last roundup, we shared some of the things we’re doing to improve notifications, including the updated notifications inbox and settings. This week, we’ve got more updates on the design, functionality, and roll out—some of which are based on feedback you gave us last week.
- Rolling the new inbox out to more platforms
The notifications inbox and settings are rolling out to more people and on more platforms. Android logged in inbox rolled out to 5%, logged out inbox went from 30% to 60%.
- Mark All As Read is available on the Web
If you’re using the notifications inbox on the web, now you can Mark All As Read just like iOS and Android can. (Thanks to those of you who called this one out.) Right now this is only rolled out to 5% to make sure everything’s working correctly, and we’ll be ramping up over the week.
- A small test to help out small communities
When you subscribe to smaller communities that don’t have as many members (and thus have posts that may not get as many upvotes) it’s hard for them to compete for a space in your feed. To help them out, we’re running a test to feature them more often in notifications for the first one to two weeks. People in the test (and all redditors) will have the ability to visit their settings to lower the frequency of the notifications they receive from a specific community or turn them off altogether.
Emails that look pretty, and work better too
If you’re opted in to emails, you may have noticed that the emails you receive when you get a post or comment reply, username mention, or direct message have changed. Previously, we had some issues where people reported not getting emails for posts and comment replies, so we made some fixes on the backend to ensure things were triggering and being tracked correctly. And the frontend got an update too. Check out the new look:
In addition to the updates, we also added three new emails that we’re testing to let redditors know about new chat requests, upvotes on their posts and comments, and new followers. This is going out to 5% of redditors who have opted in to similar emails about their activity, and all of these are included in users’ email settings so they can pick and choose what they want to receive.
Promoting the app outside the U.S.
We know some mobile web users will never download the app. It’s just not for them. So instead of prompting them to download the app, we’re testing asking people to create an account and/or log in to view content instead. Right now this is being tested in select countries with five different variants.
When upvote and downvote aren’t enough, sidevote
Keep your eye out for new awards this week. In addition to the new Sidevote award, you’ll also find Hehehehe (when hehehe isn’t enough), Heartbreak (just in time for Valentine’s Day!), Calculating, Blow a Kiss, and Wait, What? awards.
Bringing more community settings to mobile
One of the goals for the year ahead is to make it easier to mod from mobile. Today, moderators on Android will be happy to know that they now have all the mobile settings that iOS mods have. Moderators can set their primary language, add and edit posts and user flair, and manage post types (including specific link types) from Android.
Bugs and small fixes
Here’s what’s up with the native apps:
iOS updates and fixes:
- The spacing around Predictions looks much better now
- Previews of Reddit URLs with non-ascii characters will render correctly in chat again
- Spaces won’t be removed from the title field of posts created using the QuickPath swipe keyboard anymore
- Not Safe for Work (NSFW) content won’t display while searching for communities or users unless you’ve opted in to seeing NSFW content in search results
Android updates and fixes:
- If you get a loading error, we let you know what happened and provide you with a button to retry
- When you open a group chat you can scroll to see all the members now
And that’s it for this week! We’ll be around to answer your questions and hear your thoughts.
18:29 UTC
Updates to notifications, avatar enhancements, a better best sort, and more
Whew, it’s been a crazy two weeks! Here at Reddit we’ve been hard at work and have some fun stuff to share with you today. Let’s just jump in, shall we?
We shall.
Here’s what went out January 6th–19th
All about those avatars
Avatars are great, but they can always be better. That’s why we’ve made some new expansions and improvements.
- New gear for the new year! Check out the latest fashions and accessories to keep your avatar looking fresh.
- Better, faster, stronger… We’ve updated the foundational tech that makes avatars work so they can be more scalable, secure, and have better telemetry. This may sound like boring engineering stuff to some but this work means that you can do important things like change the color of your beard without changing the color of your hair or hold something in your right hand without canceling out what you’re holding in your left hand.
- Avatars aren’t just fun, they’re also functional. We’ve already added profile images and avatars to comment threads on Android and mobile web, and this week they rolled out to desktop as well. (Don’t worry iOS, you’re next.) We’ve found this helps people visually track the back and forth in a conversation, and it also results in more profile views and people starting chats with each other—so avatars are actually helping redditors connect.
A notification about your notifications
An updated interface and more control over what notifications you receive is on the way.
- First off, you’ll be getting a new notification inbox soon, complete with profile and community images and the ability to hide and manage notifications in-line. We’re rolled out to 5% on iOS, Android, and desktop now, and are testing things to make sure there aren’t any major bugs or improvements we need to make before rolling out further. Here’s what it looks like on iOS:
- Next, you can’t have a new inbox without new user settings as well. Now you can control what inbox notifications and emails you’d like to receive from the mobile web, iOS, Android, and desktop.
Rolling out to new platforms
We’re expanding two features that were mentioned in previous updates, so we can gather more information on how they're performing and make them available to more people.
- Now redditors on Android and desktop have the ability to sign up or log in to their account with a magic link—a link we send to your email address that lets you access your Reddit account with one click. (This is already out on iOS.)
- New redditors on Android, mobile web, and desktop will now be able to select more detailed subtopics they’re interested in, instead of super general ones, after creating their accounts. (This is already out on iOS.)
And a few more miscellaneous items
- What’s better than best? An improved best sort! We’re running an A/B test where the best sort on comment threads will prioritize comments with a high upvote ratio. The idea is that this will help high-quality comments that don’t have a lot of views yet get the attention they deserve. (It’s a very subtle change, but we think it’ll make our best sort even better.)
- Previously, the award sheet you see on post and comments was different than what you saw while awarding a live video. Now we’ve cleaned them up to be the same.
- For the next two weeks, we’re testing giving logged out redditors on the mobile web various offers and rewards if they download the app for the first time and log in to their account. This limited test will go to 25% of mobile web users.
- If you haven’t verified your account with an email yet, you should. (Verifying your account gives you a way to log in if you forget your password, and helps ensure you won’t get locked out of your account.) We’re reminding redditors who haven’t verified their account yet to do so, using a dismissible banner on iOS.
Bugs and small fixes
Here’s what’s up with the native apps:
iOS bug fixes:
- Blurred NSFW images in a media gallery will unblur after they’re viewed in theatre mode now
- You can search for posts by filtering by date again
- When you scroll up on a chat it won’t jump you to the most recent message anymore
- The app won’t crash while watching videos anymore
- Reddit live streams will play with the correct color theme now
- Opening comment threads with permalinks won’t crash the app now
Android updates and fixes:
- The pop up asking you to rate the app will show up less often now
- Push notifications open correctly for everyone again
- Chat notification badges update consistently again
- The exit button works while Anonymous Browsing again
Hope you have a great week. As always, we’ll be around for a bit to answer your questions.
22:03 UTC
The code is unfrozen! Here’s your first (super short) changelog roundup of 2021
Happy New Year, redditors! We hope you enjoyed the holidays and all the end-of-year product updates featured in the last roundup. Here at Reddit, we’re coming out of our code freeze and have a few small product updates to share while we’re still thawing ourselves out.
Here’s what went out December 16th–January 4th
It’s time to pack up those holiday decorations
Even though leaving your Christmas lights on all year long is kind of cool, this week we’ll be taking our holiday decorations down. Throughout the week, you’ll notice that holiday awards will transform back into their previous, non-holidazed selves.
Now web users can enjoy the occasional coin-free award too
Many redditors on Android and iOS have enjoyed getting a coin-free award thrown their way every now and then, and now those of you on the web can enjoy the same. We’re rolling out coin-free awards on web slowly, so keep an eye on the coins store for a notification. If you see one, it may be your freebie.
Keeping notifications fresh
Even if you’re a hardcore redditor, who likes to know all the things all the time, it’s still possible to get a common condition called notification fatigue (which, basically means you’re sick of notifications). To help avoid this, we’re testing different types of notifications.
One is "inbox-only notifications"—notifications that don’t go to your phone, but do go to your Reddit inbox. Another is “silent notifications”—notifications that go to your phone, but don’t interrupt any windows/apps you have open or play sound. If you’re in the test and have already opted into trending notifications, you’ll get your first trending notification of the day sent to your phone like always, while the second will be a test of one of these variations.
And that’s it for today! Stay tuned for more fortnightly product updates throughout 2021.
21:11 UTC