It’s a great year for reddit. After his IPOThe platform is planning a number of product features for next year and, spoiler alert, most of them are powered by artificial intelligence.
“I think the IPO was an important milestone, but we’re just focused on building for our users,” Reddit chief product officer Pali Baht told TechCrunch.
Reddit’s product roadmap includes faster loading times, more tools for moderators and developers, and an AI-powered language translation feature to bring Reddit to a more global audience.
“This is actually a really interesting use of LLMs, where we can do translations in a more nuanced way than ever before,” Baht said. “If you’re in, say, France, you’ll be able to use Reddit in French, regardless of who the majority of users on that subreddit are.”
So if a user posts in French, an English-speaking Redditor could read the post in English and respond, and the French speaker could see their response in their own language and respond in the same way.
“For a long time, Reddit was primarily an English-only platform and was largely focused on the United States, the United Kingdom and Mexico,” Baht said. “We are now expanding dramatically around the world and have already had a significant number of users coming from the rest of the world.”
If you’re an investor in Reddit, this is probably music to your ears. But Baht has the data to back it up. According to Reddit’s IPO filing, as of December 2023, 50% of Reddit’s daily active unique users were from countries outside the US.
AI is also at the center of Reddit’s updates to the moderator experience. Reddit recently unfolded Keyword highlighting features make it easier for mods to find potentially infringing content in their subreddits, along with tools to manage the influx of new members. The company will build on those updates with other new tools, such as an LLM that trains on moderators’ past decisions and actions.
Reddit provoked mass user protests last year when it changed its API pricing structure, meaning some popular third-party Reddit apps would have to pay seven-figure bills if they continued to operate. This backlash has subsided, but now Reddit is encouraging developers to build directly on Reddit and without payment, but Baht says this could change in the future.
You can find the products from the developer platform at r/WallStreetBets, where there is a live panel of trending stocks, posters and commentators. And, as Baht points out, one of the most popular Super Bowl scoreboards actually came from r/TaylorSwift – Go figure.
“The best thing is that it is unlocking experiences that we ourselves would not have imagined,” he said. “And that’s just incredible, and it’s all built on top of our API.”