The Scoop: How Reddit went from unmoderated mess to hot IPO

Not so long ago, Reddit was a fairly lawless place. Yes, moderators oversaw some of the thousands of subreddit communities with an iron fist, but others allowed some of the worst abuse, hatred or even criminality the web has to offer a place to thrive.

That’s changed radically. Reddit is now one of the buzziest companies on the New York Stock Exchange, closing at $50.44 after its first day of trading, which means a market cap of $9.5 billion.

New York Times columnist Kevin Roose lays much of the success for the booming stock at the feet of a major shift in moderation policies in the last few years.

Roose points to three key factors that allowed Reddit to clean up some of the nastier corners of its website, and how its content efforts succeeded when many other social media companies have failed, creating environments that are unsafe for both users and brands.

1. Rather than trying to ban individual bad actors, Reddit deleted entire online communities that caused repeated problems. Granted, part of this is possible due to Reddit’s unique format that is built around communities. This wouldn’t work on a site like X, for instance. But Roose says that by getting rid of entire subreddits, it either forced bad actors off the site or forced them to clean up their act.
2. Reddit outsourced content moderation to volunteers. Each subreddit is governed by a team of moderators who are charged with enforcing both the site’s rules as well as any unique rules of that particular community. While this can cause issues, such as a wide-scale moderator revolt last year over API changes, Roose credits this volunteer army with much of the site’s turnaround.
3. Finally, as Roose puts it: “policed behavior rather than morality, and it did so without worrying too much about being seen as capricious or biased.” While Meta in particular has bent itself into a pretzel trying to appear balanced to largely conservative critics, Reddit simply banned the bad behavior, whatever side of the spectrum it came from.

Why it matters: Reddit is becoming an increasingly attractive option for brands. Due to the IPO, they’re rolling out tons of new ad options, tools and analytics to woo brands, making it an attractive place for both paid and organic social activity.

Reddit is also becoming an increasingly important search tool. Roose notes that he often adds “reddit.com” to his Google searches to help him find relevant information from real people amid the myriad of posts on the site. Google has taken note of this and is now partnering with Reddit in a variety of ways, including to train its LLM.

To be clear, there are still plenty of dark corners of Reddit. There’s porn galore, for one thing. But for many brands looking to connect with customers, it’s now worth a look, whether for simply monitoring to see consumer sentiment or being an active participant in relevant communities.

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Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.