It’s a big year for Reddit. Following its IPO, the platform is planning a slew of product features for the coming year and, spoiler alert, most of them are powered by AI.
“I think the IPO was a big milestone, but we’re just focused on building for our users,” Pali Baht, Reddit’s chief product officer, told TechCrunch.
Reddit’s product roadmap includes faster load 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, allowing us to 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 most users on that subreddit.”
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 kind.
“For the longest time, Reddit was largely an English-only platform and heavily focused on the US, UK and Mexico,” Baht said. “We are currently experiencing dramatic expansion across the world and have already had a significant number of users 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 came from non-US countries.
AI is also at the heart of Reddit’s moderator experience updates. Reddit recently rolled out keyword highlighting features that make it easier for mods to find potentially violating content in their subreddits, as well as tools to manage the influx of new members. The company will build on these updates with other new tools, such as an LLM trained on moderators’ past decisions and actions.
Reddit sparked massive user protests last year when it changed its API pricing structure, meaning some popular third-party Reddit apps would end up with seven-figure bills if they continued to operate. This backlash has subsided, but Reddit now encourages developers to build directly on Reddit and without compensation – but Baht says that could change in the future.
You can find the development platform products on r/WallStreetBets, where you will find a live dashboard of trending stocks, posters and commentators. And, as Baht notes, one of the most popular Super Bowl dashboards actually came from r/TaylorSwift — go figure.
“The coolest thing is that it gives us access to experiences that we wouldn’t have imagined ourselves,” he said. “And it’s just awesome, and it’s all built on our API.”
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