It’s an enormous yr for Reddit. After its IPO, the platform is planning a slew of product options for the yr forward, and — spoiler alert — most of them are powered by AI.
“I believe the IPO was an necessary milestone, however we’re simply targeted on constructing for our customers,” Reddit chief product officer Pali Bhat instructed Trendster.
Reddit’s product roadmap contains sooner loading occasions, extra instruments for moderators and builders, and an AI-powered language translation characteristic to carry Reddit to a extra world viewers.
“That is truly a extremely cool use of LLMs, the place we will do translations in a extra nuanced means than ever earlier than,” Bhat stated. “In case you’re in, let’s say, France, it is possible for you to to make use of Reddit in French, no matter what a lot of the customers of that subreddit is perhaps.”
So, if a person posts in French, an English-speaking Redditor may learn the submit in English and reply — and the French speaker may see their response in their very own language and reply in variety.
“For the longest time, Reddit was largely an English-only platform, and targeted closely on the USA, United Kingdom, and Mexico,” Bhat stated. “We’re now increasing dramatically the world over, and we’ve already had a major variety of customers coming in from the remainder of the world.”
In case you’re an investor in Reddit, that’s in all probability music to your ears. However Bhat has the information to again it up. In response to Reddit’s IPO submitting, in December 2023, 50% of Reddit’s day by day energetic distinctive customers had been from non-U.S. international locations.
AI can be on the coronary heart of Reddit’s updates to the moderator expertise. Reddit just lately rolled out key phrase highlighting options that make it simpler for mods to search out doubtlessly violative content material of their subreddits, together with instruments to handle influxes of recent members. The corporate will construct on these updates with different new instruments, like an LLM that’s educated on moderators’ previous selections and actions.
Reddit sparked mass person protests final yr when it modified its API pricing construction, that means that some in style 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 immediately on Reddit, and with out pay — however Bhat says this might change sooner or later.
You’ll find the merchandise from the developer platform on r/WallStreetBets, the place there’s a dwell dashboard of trending shares, posters and commenters. And, as Bhat notes, one of the in style Tremendous Bowl scoreboards truly got here from r/TaylorSwift — go determine.
“The good factor is that it’s unlocking experiences that we ourselves wouldn’t have imagined,” he stated. “And that’s simply superior, and it’s all constructed on high of our API.”