It’s a giant 12 months for Reddit. After its IPO, the platform is planning a slew of product options for the 12 months forward, and — spoiler alert — most of them are powered by AI.
“I think the IPO was an important milestone, but we’re just focused on building for our users,” Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Baht advised TechCrunch.
Reddit’s product roadmap consists of quicker loading occasions, extra instruments for moderators and builders, and an AI-powered language translation characteristic to deliver Reddit to a extra international viewers.
“This is actually a really cool use of LLMs, where we can do translations in a more nuanced way than ever before,” Baht mentioned. “If you’re in, let’s say, France, you will be able to use Reddit in French, regardless of what most of the users of that subreddit might be.”
So, if a consumer posts in French, an English-speaking Redditor might learn the submit in English and reply — and the French speaker might see their response in their very own language and reply in type.
“For the longest time, Reddit was largely an English-only platform, and focused heavily on the United States, United Kingdom, and Mexico,” Baht mentioned. “We’re now expanding dramatically across the world, and we’ve already had a significant number of users coming in from the rest of the world.”
When you’re an investor in Reddit, that’s in all probability music to your ears. However Baht has the info to again it up. Based on Reddit’s IPO submitting, in December 2023, 50% of Reddit’s every day energetic distinctive customers had been from non-U.S. international locations.
AI can also be on the coronary heart of Reddit’s updates to the moderator expertise. Reddit not too long ago rolled out key phrase highlighting options that make it simpler for mods to seek out doubtlessly violative content material of their subreddits, together with instruments to handle influxes of latest members. The corporate will construct on these updates with different new instruments, like an LLM that’s skilled on moderators’ previous selections and actions.
Reddit sparked mass user protests final 12 months when it modified its API pricing construction, which means that some fashionable third-party Reddit apps can be caught with seven-figure payments in the event that they continued to function. This backlash has died down, however now Reddit is encouraging builders to construct instantly on Reddit, and with out pay — however Baht says this might change sooner or later.
You will discover the merchandise from the developer platform on r/WallStreetBets, the place there’s a dwell dashboard of trending shares, posters and commenters. And, as Baht notes, one of the fashionable Tremendous Bowl scoreboards truly got here from r/TaylorSwift — go determine.
“The coolest thing is that it’s unlocking experiences that we ourselves wouldn’t have imagine,” he mentioned. “And that’s just awesome, and it’s all built on top of our API.”
