Reddit

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Reddit

Basic information
Founded	2005
Legal structure	Public
Industry	Social Media Services
Official website	https://reddit.com/

Reddit is an American social media network for social-news aggregation, content rating, and forums. As of December 2024, Reddit is the eighth most-visited website in the world. It was founded in 2005 by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, as well as Aaron Swartz.

Consumer Impact Summary

• User freedom: Went closed-source in 2017, paywalled the API and blocked anonymous users on VPNs in 2023,^{[citation needed]} halted archiving posts via the Internet Archive due to "AI scraping concerns"
• User Privacy: Had a data breach in 2018.
• Business model: Primarily funded through advertisements, has a premium subscription,requires paying to use the API since 2023^{[citation needed]}
• Market competition: Plenty; Imgur, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram

Incidents

Going closed source

In September 2017, Reddit reverted on their open source policy and archived their public repositories, citing difficulty to stealth launch features and desire to move away from a monorepo architecture. Users responded by noting that neither of these reasons require being closed source, and that Reddit had been slowly becoming less transparent over time.

Data breach

In August 2018, Reddit suffered a data breach due to employees using SMS two-factor authentication (2FA). Leaked data included old hashed passwords and private messages from before 2007.

Erasing Aaron Swartz

In October 2020, Reddit removed the late co-founder Aaron Swartz from their About page. Swartz was a political activist supporting open access to knowledge resources. He died by suicide in 2013 to avoid prosecution for leaking MIT's archive of research articles.

API paywall

In April 2023, Reddit announced that they would be locking API features and functionality previously accessible to its users behind a paywall, citing concerns about user generated content being trained on AI. This resulted in a backlash in the community, as alternative apps utilizing Reddit's API would be rendered completely useless as a result of this decision. While some users held out hope that app developers could pay this fee to keep their user base, Apollo developer Christian Selig crushed any hope of this idea, explaining that the cost of this API fee was too high and that he would be ceasing development for the foreseeable future.

Users expressed concerns that this wasn't because of AI, but rather, due to greed and an attempt to monopolize information, as Reddit is often cited as many people's go to resource for almost any topic. This sentiment resulted in one of the largest internet protests known as the Reddit Blackout. The Reddit Blackout was an event in which subreddits were closed, marked as NSFW to prevent advertisements from being displayed on them, or flooded with posts shaming Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman. Users also edited their posts, deleted them, or deleted their Reddit accounts to shame Huffman in an attempt to reduce the value of the information.

VPN blockage

In December 2023, Reddit blocked access to the platform

Reddit started blocking users from accessing the site while using a VPN, unless they logged in.

Ads looking like user posts

In March 2024, Reddit rolled out a feature that made ads look like they came from real users (and by extent, were "upvoted" by real users). Reddit boasted that these ads had a 28% higher click-through rate than regular ads.

To block the internet archive

In 2025, Reddit announced it would block the indexing of its pages by the Internet Archive. This will make it impossible for you to find deleted Reddit threads or other such pages that are no longer accessible today.

See also

• Lemmy