Reddit

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

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Reddit is an American social 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 by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, as well as Aaron Swartz, in 2005.

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 neither of these reasons require being closed source, and that Reddit had been slowly being less transparent over time.^[1]

Data breach

In August 2018, Reddit suffered a data breach due to employees using SMS 2FA. Leaked data included old hashed passwords and private messages from before 2007.^[2]

Erasing Aaron Swartz

In October 2020, Reddit removed the late Aaron Swartz from the About page.^[3] Aaron Swartz was a political activist supporting open access to knowledge resources who died by suicide in 2013 to avoid prosecution for leaking MIT's archive of research articles.

API paywall

In April of 2023, Reddit announced 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. 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 due to AI but 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 would be closed, marked as NSFW to prevent advertisements, or flooded with posts shaming Reddit's CEO. Users would also delete their posts, accounts, or edit them to shame the CEO in an attempt to reduce the value of the information.^[4]

VPN blockage

In December 2023, Reddit started blocking users from accessing the site while on a VPN, unless they logged in.^[5]

Ads that look 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 these ads had 28% higher click-through rate than regular ads.^[6]

Reddit arbitrary bans multiple subreddits out of nowhere

in February, 2025, 60+ subreddits that involve nsfw or adult content were temporarily banned from the website until the Reddit administration the next day reverses the decision and claims "it was a glitch in the system. ^[7]