With more than 430 million monthly users—52 million of whom engage every day—Reddit isn’t just a robust social media hub; it’s a treasure trove. Its wealth of data and information has undoubtedly complicated things for the company: On June 12, after Reddit announced plans to begin charging outside companies for access via its API, nearly 9,000 subreddit communities went dark to protest the proposed new pricing structure. But it’s precisely this intense user base that makes the 18-year-old site so valuable, particularly for anyone researching, well, anything.
Still, trying to find what you’re looking for in a long comment thread, or anywhere in the discussions among the 150,000 active communities, has often felt like searching for a straw of hay in a stack of needles. Pali Bhat, Reddit’s first chief product officer (he joined from Google Cloud two years ago), wanted to make it easier for users to find exactly what they were looking for. In March 2023, Reddit enabled search functionality within comments and discussions, decluttered the platform’s news feed, and optimized everything for mobile devices.
Bhat, who helped launch the company’s first-ever developer’s platform last year, also overhauled Reddit’s look. Users can now create a separate feed for videos “to engage in meaningful conversations within communities in whatever format they choose,” Bhat says. “We have one of the largest corpora of authentic human conversation online.” He’s trying to make sure that more authentic humans can tune in.
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