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Every day, Reddit reaches 97M daily active unique users — a phenomenal 47% growth over 2024.
It is currently the third-most visited site in the U.S., sits proudly at the top of many Google searches when people are hunting for information or advice, and is a major way to connect with communities around shared interests.
Reddit’s success can be attributed to its offering something different from your traditional social media platforms, often propped up by influencers and marketing.
It’s anonymous, moderated by users, and not follower-driven, which leads to a privacy-focused community holding authentic conversations online. Many people would rather give you their Facebook or X profile than share their Reddit username.
But how does Reddit think about Reddit itself? What has changed over 19 years? And how does it operate in a world where artificial intelligence is placing its footprints over every corner?
Techopedia spoke with Jen Wong, Chief Operating Officer of Reddit, to learn more about how Reddit handles privacy, AI, its startling user growth, making revenue, and nuanced advertising.
Key Takeaways
- Reddit saw 47% user growth in 2024, reaching 97M daily active users.
- COO Jen Wong talks to Techopedia about her journey with Reddit and how it has changed over 19 years.
- Away from the noise and influencer and marketer-driven areas of social media, Reddit focuses on privacy and genuine voices and experiences.
- Users generally remain for years, joining more sub-reddits along the way.
- We also speak about how Reddit uses AI — and how AI uses Reddit.
About Jen Wong
Jen Wong joined Reddit seven years ago and has spent most of her career in consumer media and tech.
She loves learning more about how people find information and how the Internet is changing. She thinks of Reddit as the intersection of culture, information, and technology—”a fun place to be.”
How Reddit Found a Voice
Is Reddit a fun place to visit? How do people find it? How does Wong think of Reddit?
Wong explained:
“We’ve always believed that everyone can find a home on Reddit because everybody has interests and passions, and every community and interest is represented on Reddit. So we always believed it was very extensible.
“And Reddit’s been around for 19 years and, over that time, has expanded in terms of its topics and its breadth, and I think continues to do that.
“In the last couple of years, a couple of things that we’ve done is we’ve done a lot of work on the product to fulfill the promise of being able to connect you with communities of interest and get a human perspective.
“It’s a high-quality human perspective that is untainted by influence or anything else. It’s a real-world perspective.
“It’s not a follower-driven model, which is very common in social media. In fact, 30% to 70% of Redditors are not on peer platforms.”
“They’re incredibly passionate about their topics. And it’s real. It’s real people, right?
“It’s everything from, for instance, “I’m a new parent and I need, you know, gear for XYZ“. You want a real parent who has had to load a car seat into a car to tell you, “This is the easiest one to put in”.
“Or, ‘Hey, you know, I want to make the best pizza possible’. Someone’s actually had to have tasted that pizza and been through that journey to give you that advice.
“And over the course of 19 years, we have the equivalent of that credible information, that human perspective on so many topics.”
Reddit Safety & Voting
Is Reddit hands-on or hands-off in moderation? Do communities have the freedom to flourish? How is safety determined?
Wong explained:
“You know, we obviously provide a layer of safety and universal rules across Reddit, but each community has its own rules.
“And that allows them to apply nuance to those rules. You’re in the science community. You need research that’s been peer-reviewed in the last six months. That’s the bar that they hold for that.
“That’s different than, you know, an espresso community that’s not going to have a different rule, right? So each community can figure out how it maintains the best quality conversation.”
And then you get the upvotes — everybody only gets one vote. How does that factor in?
Wong explained:
“So you have to have thousands of people vote on a post for it to be widely seen and enjoyed. You get a very credible signal because when thousands of people vote, and that’s what goes in our feed — it’s a real differentiator.
“So it’s not driven by algorithms. It’s not driven by something that just you see. It’s driven by the voting of thousands of people and people in communities who know this topic.
“And so it really grows with you. And now Reddit — even though we have a lot of people join us in, let’s say, their twenties — it’s like this bell curve of the population where, after 19 years, we have continued to retain and engage and engage even more our loyal users from years ago.
“You never age out of Reddit because as you get married, have a kid, buy a house and a car, and deal with aging parents, other humans in the world are going to help you through that, and that’s so unique, so Reddit is helpful of at every stage of your life.
“And that’s very unusual in the world of social media where many people age out, where the experience is very focused around a certain activity or moment in your life where you’re communicating in a certain way with a certain set of people.
“Reddit is just something that grows with you privately over time.”
How Reddit Uses AI & Machine Learning
Is there a place on the Internet without AI these days? Wong explained the various ways Reddit uses it.
She said:
“The first is that today, almost every general large language model [LLMs] has used Reddit’s data to train on, to understand relevance, to understand conversation because Reddit is the home of conversation between many people, right?
“And as that evolved, I think the value of our human perspective goes up.
“It goes up because these models need that information to train on. It has to summarize something. In a lot of cases, it’s summarizing Reddit because you still need a human to decide, ‘Was this car easy to drive? Did I like it? Was this recipe actually delicious?’
“And then the second use of AI is, it’s an opportunity for us to improve our product.
“Reddit has grown mostly with an English corpus started in the US and UK, Canada, Australia — 50% of our traffic is from outside of the US, but a lot of those users still operate in English.
“The quality of machine translation using AI is so high now that you can really get the vernacular and the nuance. And so we’re in the process of using machine translation to help have non-English experiences based on that corpus of content that we already have.
“It helps with the universal questions, like on the AskReddit sub, which are human questions that everybody universally, you know, wants to talk about and get maybe even global perspective on.”
Advertising & Shopping on Reddit
One area that many Redditors will not associate the platform with is shopping. However, it’s in there.
If you develop a new interest, Reddit may play a role in your purchase. You want real people who brought those brands to give authentic advice on using and owning that product.
But Wong stresses the importance of perspective. A political community is different from an espresso community, which is different from a hair community. Nuance is crucial. Redditors are empowered to upvote or downvote and cast their vote on any piece of content.
“We only run ads in communities that have even been reviewed. There’s a process by which we determine where we run ads. But then also we give advertisers a choice.
“So, we have our own set of baseline safety, adjacency checks, negative keywords that we remove, and so forth.
“We do all those things just as a base level of brand safety. Our view is that we allow advertisers to determine the best balance of performance and environment for them.”
As a final question, how much does Jen use Reddit?
“I’m a huge user myself. I must have over a hundred subreddits, possibly even more.
“But I’ve learned that Reddit isn’t just about communities. It’s about creating a space where users can grow, engage, and find information that truly resonates with them.”
The Bottom Line
Maybe Jen Wong said it best: “The best part of Reddit is its human perspective — real people sharing real experiences.”
And although it often feels that algorithms are taking over our lives, Reddit proves that community remains king.
