Reddit

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.

• User freedom: Went closed-source in 2017,^[1] limited free API use^[2] and blocked anonymous users on VPNs in 2023,^[3] and halted archiving posts via the Internet Archive due to "AI scraping concerns"^[4]
• User Privacy: Had a data breach in 2018.^[5][6]
• Business model: Primarily funded through advertisements, has a premium subscription,requires paying for elevated API usage since 2023.^[2]
• Market competition: Plenty; Imgur, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram

Since June 2014, individual upvote and down-vote counts on posts are no longer publicly visible. Only the sum of votes and the percentage of upvotes are publicly visible.^[7]

Since January 2016, vote counts on comments pinned by Reddit moderators are hidden from public view and only visible to moderators of the same subreddit. This prevents the public from knowing whether moderator decisions were widely agreed upon.^[8]

In September 2017, Reddit reversed 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.^[1]

In August 2018, Reddit suffered a data breach due to employees using SMS two-factor authentication (2FA). Leaked data included an old database containing usernames, e-mails, encrypted passwords, public posts and private messages from Reddit's launch date, in 2005, through to May 2007. Additionally usernames and e-mail addresses from users that received daily digests (e-mails containing post suggestions) sent between 3 June and 17 June 2018 were also leaked.^[5][6]

Since January 2022, users can block each other from commenting on their posts and comments. Before, blocking would only hide a blocked user's content from oneself and prevent a blocked user from appearing in one's notifications. Since this change, users can prevent others from commenting valid criticism and refuting arguments that would have added value to a discussion. This makes discussions less meritocratic, meaning the final word rests with the person who blocked the other participant(s) first, not the person with the most merited arguments.^[9]

Shortly after this change, reports piled up of the new blocking feature being used to prevent others from counter-arguing in discussions. It was also noted that preventing unwanted participants is already the purpose of communities' moderation teams, not individual users, meaning the new blocking feature gives normal users almost moderator-like powers within their own submissions. To these concerns, a Reddit administrator (employee) responded with "we're working to make sure people feel safe using our site without unduly preventing others from participating".^[10]

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 such as Apollo 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 sub-reddits 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.^[11]

In December 2023, Reddit began blocking VPN access to users not logged in to the site.^[3]

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.^[12]

Since June 2025, Reddit has given its users the ability to hide their posting and commenting history from public view. If this setting is enabled, the posts and comments only remain visible through subreddit pages, not profile pages. Only the account owner themselves and moderators of subreddits they have interacted with during the last 28 days can view the posting and commenting history.^[13]

This is different from "private profiles" on some other social media services such as X, where setting one's profile to private would hide both their profile and posts in discussion threads, limiting interaction to one's followers.

An argument cited for private profiles is discussing sensitive topics.^[14] It should, however, be noted that Reddit already allowed people to participate on separate accounts for discussing sensitive topics that they did not wish to associate with their existing account.^[15]

TechCrunch's Sarah Perez speculated that a possible reason for this change was to have user data like engagement and interests associated with a single user account, making it easier for Reddit to target advertisements.^[16]

In 2025, Reddit announced it would block the indexing of its pages by the Internet Archive. This means users will no longer be able to access deleted Reddit threads.^[4]

• Lemmy