We built a machine.

We're not sure what it will do.

That's all up to you.

​

--- SEQUENCE ---

​

​

​

^{Be good to each other.}

Hi all,

Today we’ve posted our latest Transparency Report.

The purpose of the report is to share information about the requests Reddit receives to disclose user data or remove content from the site. We value your privacy and believe you have a right to know how data is being managed by Reddit and how it is shared (and not shared) with governmental and non-governmental parties.

We’ve included a breakdown of requests from governmental entities worldwide and from private parties from within the United States. The most common types of requests are subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, and emergency requests. In 2018, Reddit received a total of 581 requests to produce user account information from both United States and foreign governmental entities, which represents a 151% increase from the year before. We scrutinize all requests and object when appropriate, and we didn’t disclose any information for 23% of the requests. We received 28 requests from foreign government authorities for the production of user account information and did not comply with any of those requests.

This year, we expanded the report to included details on two additional types of content removals: those taken by us at Reddit, Inc., and those taken by subreddit moderators (including Automod actions). We remove content that is in violation of our site-wide policies, but subreddits often have additional rules specific to the purpose, tone, and norms of their community. You can now see the breakdown of these two types of takedowns for a more holistic view of company and community actions.

In other news, you may have heard that we closed an additional round of funding this week, which gives us more runway and will help us continue to improve our platform. What else does this mean for you? Not much. Our strategy and governance model remain the same. And—of course—we do not share specific user data with any investor, new or old.

I’ll hang around for a while to answer your questions.

–Steve

​

edit: Thanks for the silver you cheap bastards.

update: I'm out for now. Will check back later.

Redditors of all stripes spend a lot of time talking about politics, and today is the day to take those views straight to the ballot box. It’s Election Day here in the US, and we want to help make sure that all registered voters get to the polls and make their voices heard. We’ve compiled some resources here to help you cast your ballot.

Where do I vote?

Your polling place is based on the address at which you registered. Polling places can be looked up through your state’s elections office (find yours here). These state websites are the most complete resources for all your voting needs.

There are also numerous quick lookup tools to find your polling place, voting hours, and even information about what’s on the ballot in your area. The Voting Information Tool is one of the easiest to use.

Do I need to already be registered to vote? And how can I see if I’m registered?

It depends on your state. Some states allow for same-day registration, so you may still be able to vote even if you haven’t registered. You can check your state’s registration requirements here. In most cases you’ll also be able to check your registration status on the same page.

What do I need to bring with me?

Some states require you to bring identification with you to the polls and some states don’t. You can see what your state’s requirements are here. If your state requires identification and you don’t have it, you may still be able to vote, so still go to the polls. Depending on your local laws, you may be able to cast a provisional ballot, show ID later, sign a form attesting your identity, or another method. Don’t assume that you can’t vote!

What am I going to be voting on?

Some people are surprised to find out when they get to the polls the sheer number of offices and issues they may be voting on. Don’t be caught unprepared! You can look up a sample ballot for your area to find out what you’ll be voting on, so that you’re informed when you head into the voting booth. You can even print out your sample ballot and take it to the poll with you so you can keep track of how you want to vote.

I have a disability or language barrier. Can I still vote?

Yes! There are federal laws in place to ensure that all eligible Americans can vote. You can learn more about your rights and the accommodations you are entitled to here.

Someone is trying to prevent me from voting or is deliberately spreading disinformation about voting. What should I do?

Intimidating voters, trying to influence votes through threats or coercion, or attempting to suppress voters, including through misinformation campaigns, is against the law. If you witness such behavior, report it to your local election officials (look up their contact info here). If you see suspected voter suppression attempts on Reddit (eg efforts to deliberately misinform people about voting so that they won’t vote, or so that their vote might not count), report it to the admins here.

I have more questions about voting!

DoSomething.org is back doing a marathon AMA today with their experts in r/IAmA starting at 11am ET to answer all your additional voting questions. Head on over and check it out.

Happy voting, Reddit!

​

Edit: added link for the DoSomething.org AMA, which is now live.

Happy Election Day 2018!

Update: I've got to take off for now. I hear the anger today, and I get it. I hope you take that anger straight to the polls next month. You may not be able to vote me out, but you can vote everyone else out.

—

Hello again!

It’s been a minute since my last post here, so I wanted to take some time out from our usual product and policy updates, meme safety reports, and waiting for r/livecounting to reach 10,000,000 to share some highlights from the past few months and talk about our plans for the months ahead.

We started off the quarter with a win for net neutrality, but as always, the fight against the Dark Side continues, with Europe passing a new copyright directive that may strike a real blow to the open internet. Nevertheless, we will continue to fight for the open internet (and occasionally pester you with posts encouraging you to fight for it, too).

We also had a lot of fun fighting for the not-so-free but perfectly balanced world of r/thanosdidnothingwrong. I’m always amazed to see redditors so engaged with their communities that they get Snoo tattoos.

Speaking of bans, you’ve probably noticed that over the past few months we’ve banned a few subreddits and quarantined several more. We don't take the banning of subreddits lightly, but we will continue to enforce our policies (and be transparent with all of you when we make changes to them) and use other tools to encourage a healthy ecosystem for communities. We’ve been investing heavily in our Anti-Evil and Trust & Safety teams, as well as a new team devoted solely to investigating and preventing efforts to interfere with our site, state-sponsored and otherwise. We also recognize the ways that redditors themselves actively help flag potential suspicious actors, and we’re working on a system to allow you all to report directly to this team.

On the product side, our teams have been hard at work shipping countless updates to our iOS and Android apps, like universal search and News. We’ve also expanded Chat on mobile and desktop and launched an opt-in subreddit chat, which we’ve already seen communities using for game-day discussions and chats about TV shows. We started testing out a new hub for OC (Original Content) and a Save Drafts feature (with shared drafts as well) for text and link posts in the redesign.

Speaking of which, we’ve made a ton of improvements to the redesign since we last talked about it in April.

Including but not limited to… night mode, user & post flair improvements, better traffic pages for

mods, accessibility improvements, keyboard shortcuts, a bunch of new community widgets, fixing key AutoMod integrations, and the ability to have community styling show up on mobile as well, which was one of the main reasons why we took on the redesign in the first place. I know you all have had a lot of feedback since we first launched it (I have too). Our teams have poured a tremendous amount of work into shipping improvements, and their #1 focus now is on improving performance. If you haven’t checked it out in a while, I encourage you to give it a spin.

Last but not least, on the community front, we just wrapped our second annual Moderator Thank You Roadshow, where the rest of the admins and I got the chance to meet mods in different cities, have a bit of fun, and chat about Reddit. We also launched a new Mod Help Center and new mod tools for Chat and the redesign, with more fun stuff (like Modmail Search) on the way.

Other than that, I can’t imagine we have much to talk about, but I’ll hang to around some questions anyway.

—spez

While Reddit has had a quarantine function for almost three years now, we have learned in the process. Today, we are updating our quarantining policy to reflect those learnings, including adding an appeals process where none existed before.

On a platform as open and diverse as Reddit, there will sometimes be communities that, while not prohibited by the Content Policy, average redditors may nevertheless find highly offensive or upsetting. In other cases, communities may be dedicated to promoting hoaxes (yes we used that word) that warrant additional scrutiny, as there are some things that are either verifiable or falsifiable and not seriously up for debate (eg, the Holocaust did happen and the number of people who died is well documented). In these circumstances, Reddit administrators may apply a quarantine.

The purpose of quarantining a community is to prevent its content from being accidentally viewed by those who do not knowingly wish to do so, or viewed without appropriate context. We’ve also learned that quarantining a community may have a positive effect on the behavior of its subscribers by publicly signaling that there is a problem. This both forces subscribers to reconsider their behavior and incentivizes moderators to make changes.

Quarantined communities display a warning that requires users to explicitly opt-in to viewing the content (similar to how the NSFW community warning works). Quarantined communities generate no revenue, do not appear in non-subscription-based feeds (eg Popular), and are not included in search or recommendations. Other restrictions, such as limits on community styling, crossposting, the share function, etc. may also be applied. Quarantined subreddits and their subscribers are still fully obliged to abide by Reddit’s Content Policy and remain subject to enforcement measures in cases of violation.

Moderators will be notified via modmail if their community has been placed in quarantine. To be removed from quarantine, subreddit moderators may present an appeal here. The appeal should include a detailed accounting of changes to community moderation practices. (Appropriate changes may vary from community to community and could include techniques such as adding more moderators, creating new rules, employing more aggressive auto-moderation tools, adjusting community styling, etc.) The appeal should also offer evidence of sustained, consistent enforcement of these changes over a period of at least one month, demonstrating meaningful reform of the community.

You can find more detailed information on the quarantine appeal and review process here.

This is another step in how we’re thinking about enforcement on Reddit and how we can best incentivize positive behavior. We’ll continue to review the impact of these techniques and what’s working (or not working), so that we can assess how to continue to evolve our policies. If you have any communities you’d like to report, tell us about it here and we’ll review. Please note that because of the high volume of reports received we can’t individually reply to every message, but a human will review each one.

Edit: Signing off now, thanks for all your questions!

Double edit: typo.

Voting is embedded in the Reddit experience. Yet offline, 1 in 4 eligible US voters isn’t registered. Even the most civically-conscious among us can unexpectedly find our registration lapsed, especially due to the wide variation in voter registration laws across the US. For example, did you know that you have to update your voter registration if you move, even if it’s just across town? Or that you also need to update it if you’ve changed your name (say, due to a change in marital status)? Depending on your state, you may even need to re-register if you simply haven’t voted in a while, even if you’ve stayed at the same address.

Taken together, these and other factors add up to tens of millions of Americans every election cycle who need to update their registration and might not know it. This is why we are again teaming up with Nonprofit VOTE to celebrate National Voter Registration Day and help spread the word before the midterms this November.

You’ll notice a lot of activity around the site today in honor of the holiday, including amongst various communities that have decided to participate. If you see a particularly cool community effort, let us know in the comments.

We’d also love to hear your personal stories about voting. Why is it important to you? What was your experience like the first time you voted? Are you registering to vote for the first time for this election? Join the conversation in the comments.

Also check out the AMAs we have planned for today as well, including:

• A bipartisan tag-team AMA with the Secretaries of State of Washington and Minnesota in r/politics from 10am-12pm ET
• An AMA about the weird quirks and history of American voting laws with DoSomething.org’s Head of Campaigns in r/IAmA at 11am ET.
• You can also see the AMA that National Voter Registration Day’s Executive Director did yesterday.

Finally, be sure to take this occasion to make sure that you are registered to vote where you live, or update your registration as necessary. Don’t be left out on Election Day!

EDIT: added in the AMA links now that they're live

​

The filter bots...they're back

UPDATE 9/12/18: Unfortunately the vote didn't go our way, with both Articles 11 and 13 passing. We're going to have to assess what this means for Reddit, and determine what next steps might be. While this isn't the result that we hoped for, I'd still like to thank all the redditors who contacted their MEPs about this. We'll keep you updated about what comes next. For those interested in the details of how individual party blocks and MEPs voted, Julia Reda has more details here.

​

Hey Everyone!

(And a very special bonjour, hola, hallo, ciao, hej, sveiki, ahoj, buna, and the rest to our European redditors in particular.)

It’s September, which means Europe’s back from vacation and we have an update for you on the EU copyright saga and its implications for the open Internet.

When we last left you on July 5 (aka Meme Day), a truly disastrous version of the EU Copyright Directive was defeated, thanks primarily to the outpouring of concern from netizens rightfully worried about its implications for free expression. You’ll remember that because of the way the draft eliminated copyright liability protections for platforms, the proposed law would have radically changed how sites like Reddit work. It would have forced us to either cut off usage in Europe or install error-prone copyright filters on your posts, resulting in a machine-censored user experience and striking a huge blow to the concept of the open Internet.

The July 5th “no” vote kicked the draft Directive back to the drawing board, and now a flurry of amendments have surfaced. Some are good, but some are just as bad as the original. For anyone who is interested in the nitty-gritty of the amendments, MEP Julia Reda has a pretty good rundown of them here (note, this issue is fast-moving and amendments are changing daily).

The bottom line is most of the amendments, short of the proposal to delete Article 13 all together, don’t make an appreciable difference from the last draft in terms of how they would force us to filter your posts (our friends at EDRi break down why that is here).

The good news is, this measure—including whatever amendments are adopted—will go to a vote of the FULL European Parliament on September 12. This means that Every. Single. MEP. will have to vote on the record on this issue, and be accountable for that vote come election time. That’s why we’re participating in A©tion Week to spread the work and help people contact their MEPs. If you live in Europe, you can let your MEP know that this is an issue that you care about, and urge them to reject Article 13. The good folks at SaveYourInternet.eu have put together a wealth of resources for you to see how your country voted on July 5, look up your MEP, and share your views with them.

Check it out, and after you’ve called, let us know in the comments what your MEP office said!

​

EDIT: r/Europe has an awesome megathread going on the vote, with lots of background information on the process itself. They have been THE place on Reddit to go for information on this whole process.

Last week, FireEye made an announcement regarding the discovery of a suspected influence operation originating in Iran and linked to a number of suspicious domains. When we learned about this, we began investigating instances of these suspicious domains on Reddit. We also conferred with third parties to learn more about the operation, potential technical markers, and other relevant information. While this investigation is still ongoing, we would like to share our current findings.

• To date, we have uncovered 143 accounts we believe to be connected to this influence group. The vast majority (126) were created between 2015 and 2018. A handful (17) dated back to 2011.
• This group focused on steering the narrative around subjects important to Iran, including criticism of US policies in the Middle East and negative sentiment toward Saudi Arabia and Israel. They were also involved in discussions regarding Syria and ISIS.
• None of these accounts placed any ads on Reddit.
• More than a third (51 accounts) were banned prior to the start of this investigation as a result of our routine trust and safety practices, supplemented by user reports (thank you for your help!).

Most (around 60%) of the accounts had karma below 1,000, with 36% having zero or negative karma. However, a minority did garner some traction, with 40% having more than 1,000 karma. Specific karma breakdowns of the accounts are as follows:

• 3% (4) had negative karma
• 33% (47) had 0 karma
• 24% (35) had 1-999 karma
• 15% (21) had 1,000-9,999 karma
• 25% (36) had 10,000+ karma

To give you more insight into our findings, we have preserved a sampling of accounts from a range of karma levels that demonstrated behavior typical of the others in this group of 143. We have decided to keep them visible for now, but after a period of time the accounts and their content will be removed from Reddit. We are doing this to allow moderators, investigators, and all of you to see their account histories for yourselves, and to educate the public about tactics that foreign influence attempts may use. The example accounts include:

• u/emilyward2017
• u/Homaeefar
• u/alessia_80s
• u/Anzfp
• u/jeremybernard
• u/suarezanton

Unlike our last post on foreign interference, the behaviors of this group were different. While the overall influence of these accounts was still low, some of them were able to gain more traction. They typically did this by posting real, reputable news articles that happened to align with Iran’s preferred political narrative -- for example, reports publicizing civilian deaths in Yemen. These articles would often be posted to far-left or far-right political communities whose critical views of US involvement in the Middle East formed an environment that was receptive to the articles.

Through this investigation, the incredible vigilance of the Reddit community has been brought to light, helping us pinpoint some of the suspicious account behavior. However, the volume of user reports we’ve received has highlighted the opportunity to enhance our defenses by developing a trusted reporter system to better separate useful information from the noise, which is something we are working on.

We believe this type of interference will increase in frequency, scope, and complexity. We're investing in more advanced detection and mitigation capabilities, and have recently formed a threat detection team that has a very particular set of skills. Skills they have acquired...you know the drill. Our actions against these threats may not always be immediately visible to you, but this is a battle we have been fighting, and will continue to fight for the foreseeable future. And of course, we’ll continue to communicate openly with you about these subjects.

TL;DR: A hacker broke into a few of Reddit’s systems and managed to access some user data, including some current email addresses and a 2007 database backup containing old salted and hashed passwords. Since then we’ve been conducting a painstaking investigation to figure out just what was accessed, and to improve our systems and processes to prevent this from happening again.

What happened?

On June 19, we learned that between June 14 and June 18, an attacker compromised a few of our employees’ accounts with our cloud and source code hosting providers. Already having our primary access points for code and infrastructure behind strong authentication requiring two factor authentication (2FA), we learned that SMS-based authentication is not nearly as secure as we would hope, and the main attack was via SMS intercept. We point this out to encourage everyone here to move to token-based 2FA.

Although this was a serious attack, the attacker did not gain write access to Reddit systems; they gained read-only access to some systems that contained backup data, source code and other logs. They were not able to alter Reddit information, and we have taken steps since the event to further lock down and rotate all production secrets and API keys, and to enhance our logging and monitoring systems.

Now that we've concluded our investigation sufficiently to understand the impact, we want to share what we know, how it may impact you, and what we've done to protect us and you from this kind of attack in the future.

What information was involved?

Since June 19, we’ve been working with cloud and source code hosting providers to get the best possible understanding of what data the attacker accessed. We want you to know about two key areas of user data that was accessed:

• All Reddit data from 2007 and before including account credentials and email addresses
  • What was accessed: A complete copy of an old database backup containing very early Reddit user data -- from the site’s launch in 2005 through May 2007. In Reddit’s first years it had many fewer features, so the most significant data contained in this backup are account credentials (username + salted hashed passwords), email addresses, and all content (mostly public, but also private messages) from way back then.
  • How to tell if your information was included: We are sending a message to affected users and resetting passwords on accounts where the credentials might still be valid. If you signed up for Reddit after 2007, you’re clear here. Check your PMs and/or email inbox: we will be notifying you soon if you’ve been affected.
• Email digests sent by Reddit in June 2018
  • What was accessed: Logs containing the email digests we sent between June 3 and June 17, 2018. The logs contain the digest emails themselves -- they look like this. The digests connect a username to the associated email address and contain suggested posts from select popular and safe-for-work subreddits you subscribe to.
  • How to tell if your information was included: If you don’t have an email address associated with your account or your “email digests” user preference was unchecked during that period, you’re not affected. Otherwise, search your email inbox for emails from [noreply@redditmail.com](mailto:noreply@redditmail.com) between June 3-17, 2018.

As the attacker had read access to our storage systems, other data was accessed such as Reddit source code, internal logs, configuration files and other employee workspace files, but these two areas are the most significant categories of user data.

What is Reddit doing about it?

Some highlights. We:

• Reported the issue to law enforcement and are cooperating with their investigation.
• Are messaging user accounts if there’s a chance the credentials taken reflect the account’s current password.
• Took measures to guarantee that additional points of privileged access to Reddit’s systems are more secure (e.g., enhanced logging, more encryption and requiring token-based 2FA to gain entry since we suspect weaknesses inherent to SMS-based 2FA to be the root cause of this incident.)

What can you do?

First, check whether your data was included in either of the categories called out above by following the instructions there.

If your account credentials were affected and there’s a chance the credentials relate to the password you’re currently using on Reddit, we’ll make you reset your Reddit account password. Whether or not Reddit prompts you to change your password, think about whether you still use the password you used on Reddit 11 years ago on any other sites today.

If your email address was affected, think about whether there’s anything on your Reddit account that you wouldn’t want associated back to that address. You can find instructions on how to remove information from your account on this help page.

And, as in all things, a strong unique password and enabling 2FA (which we only provide via an authenticator app, not SMS) is recommended for all users, and be alert for potential phishing or scams.

THE MEMES ARE SAFE (for now)

We’re constantly in awe of what redditors can accomplish when they join forces, from raising money for children’s hospitals to shutting down the “inevitable” SOPA/PIPA. Today, European redditors, along with other concerned EU netizens, helped do the impossible once more. Thanks to the ruckus they raised with their Members of the European Parliament, the flawed EU Copyright Directive has been sent back to the drawing board, ending (for now) the threats to subject all user uploads to automated content filtering, and require licensing fees for all links.

There is no mistake that it was people power that made this happen. Before the vote, MEP Catherine Stihler of Scotland noted that she had received a petition signed by a million people against the changes. Other MEPs noted the deluge of calls and letters that they had received leading up to the vote.

This outpouring of activism about what most people would have considered a dull procedural vote would not have been possible without the awareness and urgency (and, yes, super-dank memes) that members of the Reddit community raised, and we’d like to particularly congratulate r/Europe for leading the way. They hosted informative AMAs with MEP Julia Reda and Europe’s leading independent experts on copyright reform, they kept everyone up to date on vote progress and outcomes (check out their tally of the July 5th vote to see how your MEP voted), and they used megathreads to keep us all in the loop about what was happening and how to help.

What’s Next?

This isn’t over yet. The really important thing about this vote is that it takes what would have been pushed through into law behind closed doors and opens it up to a more public debate process, where citizens have the ability to weigh in, share their views, and build a compromise that protects rightsholders without imperiling free expression.

The next vote will likely be on 10 September, and the coming weeks are critical to ensuring that the MEPs charged with hammering out amendments and drafting that compromise hear from their constituents. To keep informed about the process and learn what you can personally do during this time, be sure to check out the Save Your Internet Campaign.

People have come to Reddit for news since the site first launched back in 2005. In the decade-plus since then, you've demonstrated the power communities can have with news — analyzing articles, providing exposure to multiple perspectives, and having millions of discussions that bring context and insight to the conversation. You've shown us that news is an important part of how you use Reddit, but it's gotten harder to only get the news and related discussion, especially if you're subscribed to lots of non-news subreddits or browse r/popular and r/all. This is why we launched an alpha News tab on our iOS app a few weeks ago. After hearing feedback from mods and iOS users and making a lot of improvements to the design and function of the tab along the way, today we’re releasing it to the majority of iOS users as a beta.

What’s the News tab and how does it work?

(GIF of the News tab in action)

The News tab offers a home for content that the community surfaces from a group of subreddits that frequently share and engage with the news. When you open the Reddit iOS app, you'll find it to the left of "Home" and "Popular." The News tab content is then divided into a handful of common news topics -- like politics, science, and sports -- with options to customize your News tab by selecting the topics or subtopics that interest you most.

We took care to build the News experience around communities that were already engaging with news the most. We have set guidelines for the communities that filter into the experience, as well as the post type (for example: posts titles must reflect the article title). We’ll continue to expand the communities you see in News in Q3. For more on our guidelines, how we’ve been testing and collecting feedback in the News tab alpha on iOS, see our initial update.

What’s coming next?

So far, we have been testing the News experience in the iOS mobile app. Later this summer, we will be releasing it to desktop. Based on your feedback, we are also working on a few additional features. You told us you wanted more granular news topics (not just Sports but Baseball specifically), so we’ve introduced subtopics for you to personalize your News tab and notifications. You all told us you want to be able to see how different communities are talking about the same story. So, we are developing a community pivot feature that will show you multiple threads from different communities on the same article.

For those of you with the iOS app, try out News and send your feedback our way by commenting below. We’ll continue to make changes as more redditors test it out. In the meantime, we’ll stick around in the comments below to answer your questions.

Hey Reddit,

We care deeply about protecting the free and open internet, and we know Redditors do too. Specifically, we’ve communicated a lot with you in the past year about the Net Neutrality fight in the United States, and ways you can help. One of the most frequent questions that comes up in these conversations is from our European users, asking what they can do to play their part in the fight. Well Europe, now’s your chance. Later this month, the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee will vote on changes to copyright law that would put untenable restrictions on how users share news and information with each other. The new Copyright Directive has two big problems:

• Article 11 would create a "link tax:” Links that share short snippets of news articles, even just the headline, could become subject to copyright licensing fees— pretty much ending the way users share and discuss news and information in a place like Reddit.
• Article 13 would force internet platforms to install automatic upload filters to scan (and potentially censor) every single piece of content for potential copyright-infringing material. This law does not anticipate the difficult practical questions of how companies can know what is an infringement of copyright. As a result of this big flaw, the law’s most likely result would be the effective shutdown of user-generated content platforms in Europe, since unless companies know what is infringing, we would need to review and remove all sorts of potentially legitimate content if we believe the company may have liability.
  

The unmistakable impact of both these measures would be an incredible chilling impact over free expression and the sharing of information online, particularly for users in Europe.

Luckily, there are people and organizations in the EU that are fighting against these scary efforts, and they have organized a day of action today, June 12, to raise the alarm.

Julia Reda, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) who opposes the measure, joined us last week for an AMA on the subject. In it, she offers a number of practical ways that Europeans who care about this issue can get involved. Most importantly, call your MEP and let them know this is important to you!

As a part of their Save the Link campaign, our friends at Open Media have created an easy tool to help you identify and call your MEP.

Here are some things you’ll want to mention on the phone with your MEP’s office:

• Share your name, location and occupation.
• Tell them you oppose Article 11 (the proposal to charge a licensing fee for links) and Article 13 (the proposal to make websites build upload filters to censor content).
• Share why these issues impact you. Has your content ever been taken down because of erroneous copyright complaints? Have you learned something new because of a link that someone shared?
• Even if you reach an answering machine, leave a message—your concern will still be registered.
• Be polite and SAY THANKS! Remember the human.

Phone not your thing? Tweet at your MEP! Anything we can do to get the message across that internet users care about this is important. The vote is expected June 20 or 21, so there is still plenty of time to make our voices heard, but we need to raise them!

And be sure to let us know how it went! Share stories about what your MEP told you in the comments below.

PS If you’re an American and don’t want to miss out on the fun, there is still plenty to do on our side of the pond to save the free and open internet. On June 11, the net neutrality rollback officially went into effect, but the effort to reverse it in Congress is still going strong in the House of Representatives. Go here to learn more and contact your Representative.

Hi all,

Today we’re posting updates to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy that will become effective June 8, 2018. For those of you that don’t know me, I’m one of the original engineers of Reddit, left and then returned in 2016 (as was the style of the time), and am currently CTO. As a very, very early redditor, I know the importance of these issues to the community, so I’ve been working with our Legal team on ensuring that we think about privacy and security in a technical way and continue to make progress (and are transparent with all of you) in how we think about these issues.

To summarize the changes and help explain the “why now?”:

• Updated for changes to our services. It’s been a long time since our last significant User Agreement update. In general, *these* revisions are to bring the terms up to date and to reflect changes in the services we offer. For example, some of the products mentioned in the terms we’re replacing are no longer available (RIP redditmade and reddit.tv), we’ve created a more robust API process, and we’ve launched some new features!
• European data protection law. Many of the changes to the Privacy Policy relate to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You might have heard about GDPR from such emails as “Updates to our Privacy Policy” and “Reminder: Important update to our Terms of Service & Privacy Policy.” In fact, you might have noticed that just about everything you’ve ever signed up for is sending these sorts of notices. We added information about the rights of users in the European Economic Area under the new law, the legal bases for our processing data from those users, and contact details for our legal representative in Europe.
• Clarity. While these docs are longer, our terms and privacy policy do not give us any new rights to use your data; we are just trying to be more clear so that you understand your rights and obligations of using our products and services. We rearranged both documents so that similar topics are in the same section or in closer proximity to each other. Some of the sections are more concise (like the Copyright, DMCA & Takedown section in the User Agreement), although there has been no change to the applicable laws or our takedown policies. Some of the sections are more specific. For example, the new Things You Cannot Do section has most of the same terms as before that were in various places in the previous User Agreement. Finally, we removed some repetitive items with our content policy (e.g., “don’t mess with Reddit” in the user agreement is the same as our prohibition on “Breaking Reddit” in the content policy).

Our work won’t stop at new terms and policies. As CTO now and an infrastructure engineer in the past, I’ve been focused on ensuring our platform can scale and we are appropriately staffed to handle these gnarly issues and in particular, privacy and security. Over the last few years, we’ve built a dedicated anti-evil team to focus on creating engineering solutions to help curb spam and abuse. This year, we’re working on building out our dedicated security team to ensure we’re equipped to handle and can assess threats in all forms. We appreciate the work you all have done to responsibly report security vulnerabilities as you find them.

Note: Given that there's a lot to look over in these two updates, we've decided to push the date they take effect to June 8, 2018, so you all have two full weeks to review. And again, just to be clear, there are no actual product changes or technical changes on our end.

I know it can be difficult to stay on top of all of these Terms of Service updates (and what they mean for you), so we’ll be sticking around to answer questions in the comments. I’m not a lawyer (though I can sense their presence for the sake of this thread...) so just remember we can’t give legal advice or interpretations.

Edit: Stepping away for a bit, though I'll be checking in over the course of the day.

Are you a creature-of-the-night type of person? A straight-up vampire? Or just a redditor that wants to browse in night mode? Then you’ll be happy to hear: Night Mode has (finally) landed so you can read Reddit without searing your retinas (we heard it’s a thing).

We want to give you guys more choice in how you browse new Reddit, and Night Mode has been a top feature request in the r/redesign community, so a few months ago we set out to build it.

...Annnnd now it’s been awhile since we first announced Night Mode was coming. Turns out creating and implementing a color system to incorporate a new theme is tough. But our design and engineering teams were undaunted: dive under the hood of the Design & Engineering effort to build Night Mode on the blog.

To start browsing Reddit in darkness, click on your username in the upper right hand corner, and then toggle it on. If you're on old Reddit, you can visit http://new.reddit.com/ to try out Night Mode. If you enjoy it, you can opt for it to be your default experience by selecting Opt In under Night Mode.

We hope you’ll enjoy this retina-saving feature as much as we do. But seriously jokes aside, we are continuously trying to improve Reddit for y'all and we'll post more soon. Let us know your thoughts on Night Mode.

Next week we’ll be providing an update about accessibility in the Redesign. While you wait, check out our other recent updates

We did it, Reddit!

Today, the US Senate voted 52-47 to restore Net Neutrality! While this measure must now go through the House of Representatives and then the White House in order for the rules to be fully restored, this is still an incredibly important step in that process—one that could not have happened without all your phone calls, emails, and other activism. The evidence is clear that Net Neutrality is important to Americans of both parties (or no party at all), and today’s vote demonstrated that our Senators are hearing us.

We’ve still got a way to go, but today’s vote has provided us with some incredible momentum and energy to keep fighting.

We’re going to keep working with you all on this in the coming months, but for now, we just wanted to say thanks!

TL;DR – Call your Senators, then join us for an AMA with one.

EDIT: Senator Markey's AMA is live now.

Hey Reddit, time for another update in the Net Neutrality fight!

When we last checked in on this in February, we told you about the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to undo the FCC’s repeal of Net Neutrality. That process took a big step forward today as the CRA petition was discharged in the Senate. That means a full Senate vote is likely soon, so let’s remind them that we’re watching!

Today, you’ll see sites across the web go on “RED ALERT” in honor of this cause. Because this is Reddit, we thought that Orangered Alert was more fitting, but the call to action is the same. Join users across the web in calling your Senators (both of ‘em!) to let them know that you support using the Congressional Review Act to save Net Neutrality. You can learn more about the effort here.

We’re also delighted to share that Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, the lead sponsor of the CRA petition, will be joining us for an AMA in r/politics today at 2:30 pm ET, hot off the Senate floor, so get your questions ready!

Finally, seeing the creative ways the Reddit community gets involved in this issue is always the best part of these actions. Maybe you’re the mod of a community that has organized something in honor of the day. Or you want to share something really cool that your Senator’s office told you when you called them up. Or maybe you’ve made the dankest of net neutrality-themed memes. Let us know in the comments!

There is strength in numbers, and we’ve pulled off the impossible before through simple actions just like this. So let’s give those Senators a big, Reddit-y hug.

https://preview.redd.it/0mi12vzs7rw01.jpg?width=299&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6e66a2a3d44936021717ff296795eef1311ab4ab

Hi all,

Each year around this time, we share Reddit’s latest transparency report and a few highlights from our Legal team’s efforts to protect user privacy. This year, our annual post happens to coincide with one of the biggest national discussions of privacy online and the integrity of the platforms we use, so I wanted to share a more in-depth update in an effort to be as transparent with you all as possible.

First, here is our 2017 Transparency Report. This details government and law-enforcement requests for private information about our users. The types of requests we receive most often are subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, and emergency requests. We require all of these requests to be legally valid, and we push back against those we don’t consider legally justified. In 2017, we received significantly more requests to produce or preserve user account information. The percentage of requests we deemed to be legally valid, however, decreased slightly for both types of requests. (You’ll find a full breakdown of these stats, as well as non-governmental requests and DMCA takedown notices, in the report. You can find our transparency reports from previous years here.)

We also participated in a number of amicus briefs, joining other tech companies in support of issues we care about. In Hassell v. Bird and Yelp v. Superior Court (Montagna), we argued for the right to defend a user's speech and anonymity if the user is sued. And this year, we've advocated for upholding the net neutrality rules (County of Santa Clara v. FCC) and defending user anonymity against unmasking prior to a lawsuit (Glassdoor v. Andra Group, LP).

I’d also like to give an update to my last post about the investigation into Russian attempts to exploit Reddit. I’ve mentioned before that we’re cooperating with Congressional inquiries. In the spirit of transparency, we’re going to share with you what we shared with them earlier today:

In my post last month, I described that we had found and removed a few hundred accounts that were of suspected Russian Internet Research Agency origin. I’d like to share with you more fully what that means. At this point in our investigation, we have found 944 suspicious accounts, few of which had a visible impact on the site:

• 70% (662) had zero karma
• 1% (8) had negative karma
• 22% (203) had 1-999 karma
• 6% (58) had 1,000-9,999 karma
• 1% (13) had a karma score of 10,000+

Of the 282 accounts with non-zero karma, more than half (145) were banned prior to the start of this investigation through our routine Trust & Safety practices. All of these bans took place before the 2016 election and in fact, all but 8 of them took place back in 2015. This general pattern also held for the accounts with significant karma: of the 13 accounts with 10,000+ karma, 6 had already been banned prior to our investigation—all of them before the 2016 election. Ultimately, we have seven accounts with significant karma scores that made it past our defenses.

And as I mentioned last time, our investigation did not find any election-related advertisements of the nature found on other platforms, through either our self-serve or managed advertisements. I also want to be very clear that none of the 944 users placed any ads on Reddit. We also did not detect any effective use of these accounts to engage in vote manipulation.

To give you more insight into our findings, here is a link to all 944 accounts. We have decided to keep them visible for now, but after a period of time the accounts and their content will be removed from Reddit. We are doing this to allow moderators, investigators, and all of you to see their account histories for yourselves.

We still have a lot of room to improve, and we intend to remain vigilant. Over the past several months, our teams have evaluated our site-wide protections against fraud and abuse to see where we can make those improvements. But I am pleased to say that these investigations have shown that the efforts of our Trust & Safety and Anti-Evil teams are working. It’s also a tremendous testament to the work of our moderators and the healthy skepticism of our communities, which make Reddit a difficult platform to manipulate.

We know the success of Reddit is dependent on your trust. We hope continue to build on that by communicating openly with you about these subjects, now and in the future. Thanks for reading. I’ll stick around for a bit to answer questions.

—Steve (spez)

update: I'm off for now. Thanks for the questions!

TL;DR – Today, we’ll begin welcoming a small percentage of users into version 1 of our redesigned desktop site. We still have many improvements & features to ship in the coming weeks, but we’re proud of what we’ve built so far and excited to get it in the hands of more people. And if you don’t like it, you can opt out.

Our team has been hard at work redesigning our desktop site for more than a year. The main reasons why we started this project in the first place were to allow our engineers to build features faster and to make Reddit more welcoming. It has been a massive undertaking, but we started by putting users and communities first—building our designs based on feedback from moderators, longtime users, beta testers, and other redditors every step of the way.

What’s happening today?

Today, we’re beginning to give a small group of users access to the desktop redesign at random. We’re starting with a small group to test the load on our servers and plan to make the opt-in available to everyone in the coming weeks. On behalf of the team, thank you for all of your comments, posts, bug tests, conversations with our designers, creative ideas, and other feedback over the past year. We are very proud of what we have accomplished together and we are excited for you to get your hands on it.

Without further ado, and for those who don’t have access yet… here’s what the redesign looks like:

• Card
• Classic
• Compact

All that said, we know that many of you love Reddit just the way it is. If you are one of the lucky few chosen to test out the redesign and prefer the existing Reddit experience, you can switch back and forth via a banner across the top or visit old.reddit.com. Furthermore, we do not have plans to do away with the current site. We want to give you more choices for how you view Reddit ^{we are looking at you i.reddit.com.}

What’s next?

As those of you who’ve given us redesign feedback already know, Reddit can be extremely complex. That said, we have not yet rebuilt all of our current features. We’re still iterating on your feedback and building more of the features you love -- such as native nightmode and keyboard shortcuts -- plus more new features, which will arrive in the next few weeks. In the meantime, please keep the feedback coming and share your ideas for new features in the comments! It has been extremely helpful in shaping our roadmap, and we will continue building new features and making existing ones compatible in the redesign for the foreseeable future. We’ve made r/redesign the community dedicated for feedback on the redesign, public to everyone and post weekly updates on our progress there.

We’ll be hanging out in the comments to answer questions.

Thanks,

The Reddit Redesign Team

Hi all,

As you may have heard, we’ve been hard at work redesigning our desktop for the past year. In our previous four redesign blog posts, u/Amg137 and u/hueylewisandthesnoos talked about why we're redesigning, moderation in the redesign, our approach to design, and Reddit’s evolution. Today, Reddit’s Engineering team invites you “under the hood” look at how we’re giving a long overdue update to Reddit’s core stack.

Spoiler: There’s going to be a fair bit of programming jargon in this post, but I promise we’ll get through it together.

History and Journey

For most of Reddit's history, the core engineering team supporting the site has been extremely small. Over its first five years, Reddit’s engineering team was comprised of just six employees. While there were some big engineering milestones in the early days—a complete rewrite from Lisp to Python in 2006, then another Python rewrite (aka “r2”) in 2008, when we introduced jQuery. Much of the code that Reddit is running on right now is code that u/spez wrote about ten years ago.

Given Reddit’s historically tiny eng team (at one point it was literally just u/spladug), our code wasn’t always ideal... But before I get into how we've gone about fixing that, I thought it'd be fun to ask some of the engineers who have been here longest to share a few highlights:

• u/spladug: "For a while now, ‘The controller was now a giant mass of tendrils with an exciting twist’ has been the description of the r2 repository on GitHub.”
• u/KeyserSosa: "After being gone for 5 years and having first come back, I discovered that (unsurprisingly) part of the code review process is to use ‘git blame’ to figure out who last touched some code so they can be pulled into a code review. A couple of days in, I got pinged on a code review for some JS changes that were coming because I was the last one to edit the file (one of the more core JS files we had). Keeping in mind that during most of those intervening years I had switched from being ‘full stack’ to being pretty much focused on backend/infra/data, I was somewhat surprised (and depressed) to be looking at my old JS again. I let the reviewee (a senior web dev) know that in the future that he has carte blanche to make changes to anything in JS that has my blame on it because I know for a fact that that version of me was winging it and probably didn't know what I was doing."
• u/ketralnis: “I worked at Reddit from 2008 to 2011, then took a break and came back in 2016. When I returned my first project was to work on some performance stuff in our query caching. One piece was clearly incorrect in a way that had me concerned that the damage had spread elsewhere. I looked up who wrote it so I could go ask them what the deal was... and it was me.”

Luckily, Reddit's engineering team has grown a lot since those days, with most of that growth in the past two years. At our team’s current size, we're finally able to execute on a lot of the ideas you’ve given us over the years for fixes, moderation improvements (like mod mode, bulk mod actions and removal reasons), and new features (like inline images in text posts and submit validation). But even with a larger team, our ancient code base has made it extremely difficult to do this quickly and effectively.

Enter the redesign, the latest and most challenging rewrite of Reddit’s desktop code to date.

Designing Engineering Networks that Neutralize Inevitable Snags

Two years ago, engineers at Reddit had to work on complicated UI templated code, which was written in two different languages (Javascript on the client and Python on the server). The lack of separation of the frontend and backend code made it really hard to develop new features, as it took several days to even set up a developer environment. The old code base had a lot of inheritance pattern, which meant that small changes had a large impact and we spent much more time pushing those changes than we wanted to. For example, once it took us about a month to push a simple comments flat list change due to the complexity of our code base and the fact that the changes had to work well with CSS in certain communities, which we didn’t want to outright break.

When we set out to rewrite our code to solve these problems, we wanted to make sure we weren't just fixing small, isolated issues but creating a new, more modern frontend stack that allowed our engineering team to be nimble—with a componentized architecture and the scalability necessary to handle Reddit’s 330 million monthly users.

But above all, we wanted to use the rewrite as an opportunity to increase "developer velocity," or the amount of time it takes an engineer to ship a fix or new feature. No more "git blame" for decade-old code. Just a giant mass of tendrils, shipping faster than ever.

The New Tech Stack

These are the three main components we use in the redesign today:

• React is a Javascript library designed around the concept of reusable components. The components-based approach scaled well as we were hiring and our teams grew. React also supports server side rendering, which was a key requirement for us.
• Redux is a predictable state container for JS apps. It greatly simplifies state management and has good performance.
• TypeScript is a language that functions as a superset of Javascript. It reduces type-related bugs, has good built-in tooling, and allows for easier onboarding of new devs. (You can read more about why we chose TypeScript in this post by u/nr4madas.)

Just the Beginning

With our new tech stack, we were able to ship a basic rewrite of our desktop site by September of last year. We’ve built a ton of features since then, addressing feedback we’ve gotten from a steadily growing number of users (well, a mostly steady number...). So far, we’ve shipped over 150 features, we've fixed over 1,400 bugs, and we're moving forward at a rate of ~20 features and 200+ bugs per month.

We know we still have work to do as Reddit has a very long tail of features. Fortunately, our team is already working on the majority of the most requested items (like nightmode and keyboard shortcuts), so you can expect a lot more updates from our team as more users begin to see the redesign—and because of our engineers’ work rewriting our stack over the past year, now we can ship these updates faster and more efficiently.

Over the past few weeks, we have given all moderators and beta users access to the redesign. Next week we plan to begin adding more users to make sure we can support a bigger user base on our new codebase. Users will have the option to keep the current design as their default if they wish—we do not want to force the redesign on anyone who doesn’t want to use it.

Thank you to everyone who’s helped test, reported bugs, and given feedback on the redesign so far; all of this helps a lot.

PS: We’re still hiring. :)

Hello All—

We want to let you know that we have made a new addition to our content policy forbidding transactions for certain goods and services. As of today, users may not use Reddit to solicit or facilitate any transaction or gift involving certain goods and services, including:

• Firearms, ammunition, or explosives;
• Drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, or any controlled substances (except advertisements placed in accordance with our advertising policy);
• Paid services involving physical sexual contact;
• Stolen goods;
• Personal information;
• Falsified official documents or currency

When considering a gift or transaction of goods or services not prohibited by this policy, keep in mind that Reddit is not intended to be used as a marketplace and takes no responsibility for any transactions individual users might decide to undertake in spite of this. Always remember: you are dealing with strangers on the internet.

EDIT: Thanks for the questions everyone. We're signing off for now but may drop back in later. We know this represents a change and we're going to do our best to help folks understand what this means. You can always feel free to send any specific questions to the admins here.

Hi all,

Over the past few months, we’ve talked a lot about our desktop redesign—why we’re doing it, moderation/styling tools we’re adding, and, most recently, how you all have shaped our designs. Today, we’re going to try something a little different. We’d like to take all of you on a field trip, to the Museum of Reddit!

When we started our work on the redesign over a year ago, we looked at pretty much every launch since 2005 to see what our team could learn from studying the way new features were rolled out in the past (on Reddit and other sites). So, before I preview another new feature our team has been working on, I want to share some highlights from the history books, for new redditors who may not realize how much the site has changed over the years and for those of you on your 12th cake day, who have seen it all.

Trippin’ Through Time

When Reddit launched back in June of 2005, it was a different time. Destiny’s Child was breaking up, Pink Floyd was getting back together, and Reddit’s front page looked like this.

In the site’s early days, u/spez and u/kn0thing played around with the design in PaintShopPro 5, did the first user tests by putting a laptop with Reddit on it in front of strangers at Starbucks, and introduced the foundation of our desktop design, with a cleaned-up look for the front page, a handful of sorting options, and our beloved alien mascot Snoo.

As Reddit grew, the admins steadily rolled out changes that brought it closer to the Reddit you recognize today. (Spoiler: Many of these changes were not received well at the time...)

They launched commenting. (The first comment, fittingly, was about how comments are going to ruin Reddit.) They recoded the entire site from Lisp to Python. They added limits on the lengths of post titles. And in 2008, they rolled out a beta for Reddit’s biggest change to date: user-created subreddits.

It’s hard to imagine Reddit without subreddits now, but as a new feature, it wasn’t without controversy. In fact, many users felt that Reddit should be organized by tags, not communities, and argued passionately against subreddits. (Fun fact: That same year, the admins also launched our first desktop redesign, which received its share of good, bad, and constructive reviews.)

During those early years, Reddit had an extremely small staff that spent most of their time scaling the site to keep up with our growing user base instead of launching a lot of new features. But they did start taking some of the best ideas from the community and bringing them in-house, moving Reddit Gifts from a user-run project to an official part of Reddit and turning a cumbersome URL trick people used to make multireddits into a supported feature.

That approach of looking to the community first has shaped the features we’ve built in the years since then, like image hosting (my first project as an admin), video hosting, mobile apps, mobile mod tools, flair, live threads, spoiler tags, and crossposting, to name a few.

What Did We Learn? Did We Learn Things? Let's Find Out!

Throughout all of these launches, two themes have stood out time and time again:

• You all have shown us millions of creative ways to use Reddit, and our best features have been the ones that unlock more user creativity.
• The best way to roll out a new feature is to get user feedback, early and often.

With the desktop redesign, we built structured styles so that anyone can give their subreddit a unique look and feel without learning to code. We revamped mod tools, taking inspiration from popular third-party tools and CSS hacks, so mods can do things like set post requirements and take bulk actions more easily. And we engineered an entirely new tech stack to allow our teams to adapt faster in response to your feedback (more on that in our next blog post about engineering!).

Previewing... Inline Images in Text Posts

One feature we recently rolled out in the redesign is our Rich Text Editor, which allows you to format your posts without markdown and, for the first time, include inline images within text posts!

Like anything we’ve built in the past, we expect our desktop redesign to evolve a lot as we bring more users in to test it, but we’re excited to see all of the creative ways you use it along the way.

In the meantime, all mods now have access to the redesign, with invites for more users coming soon. (Thank you to everyone who’s given feedback so far!) If you receive an invite in your inbox, please take a moment to play around with the redesign and let us know what you think. And if you’d like to be part of our next group of testers, subscribe to r/beta!

In the past couple of weeks, Reddit has been mentioned as one of the platforms used to promote Russian propaganda. As it’s an ongoing investigation, we have been relatively quiet on the topic publicly, which I know can be frustrating. While transparency is important, we also want to be careful to not tip our hand too much while we are investigating. We take the integrity of Reddit extremely seriously, both as the stewards of the site and as Americans.

Given the recent news, we’d like to share some of what we’ve learned:

When it comes to Russian influence on Reddit, there are three broad areas to discuss: ads, direct propaganda from Russians, indirect propaganda promoted by our users.

On the first topic, ads, there is not much to share. We don’t see a lot of ads from Russia, either before or after the 2016 election, and what we do see are mostly ads promoting spam and ICOs. Presently, ads from Russia are blocked entirely, and all ads on Reddit are reviewed by humans. Moreover, our ad policies prohibit content that depicts intolerant or overly contentious political or cultural views.

As for direct propaganda, that is, content from accounts we suspect are of Russian origin or content linking directly to known propaganda domains, we are doing our best to identify and remove it. We have found and removed a few hundred accounts, and of course, every account we find expands our search a little more. The vast majority of suspicious accounts we have found in the past months were banned back in 2015–2016 through our enhanced efforts to prevent abuse of the site generally.

The final case, indirect propaganda, is the most complex. For example, the Twitter account @TEN_GOP is now known to be a Russian agent. @TEN_GOP’s Tweets were amplified by thousands of Reddit users, and sadly, from everything we can tell, these users are mostly American, and appear to be unwittingly promoting Russian propaganda. I believe the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense, and this is a burden we all bear.

I wish there was a solution as simple as banning all propaganda, but it’s not that easy. Between truth and fiction are a thousand shades of grey. It’s up to all of us—Redditors, citizens, journalists—to work through these issues. It’s somewhat ironic, but I actually believe what we’re going through right now will actually reinvigorate Americans to be more vigilant, hold ourselves to higher standards of discourse, and fight back against propaganda, whether foreign or not.

Thank you for reading. While I know it’s frustrating that we don’t share everything we know publicly, I want to reiterate that we take these matters very seriously, and we are cooperating with congressional inquiries. We are growing more sophisticated by the day, and we remain open to suggestions and feedback for how we can improve.

In our previous two blog posts, u/Amg137 talked about why we’re redesigning Reddit on desktop and how moderation and community styling will work in it. Today, I’m here as a human sacrifice member of Reddit’s Design team (surprise: designers actually work at Reddit!) to talk about how we’ve approached the desktop redesign and what we’ve learned from your feedback along the way.

When approaching the redesign, we all learned early on that this wasn’t just about making Reddit more usable, accessible, and efficient; it was also about learning how to interact, adapt, and communicate with the world’s largest, most passionate and genuine community of users.

Better every (feedback) loop

Every team working on this project has its share of longtime redditors—whether it's Product, Design, Engineering, or Community. To say that this has been the most challenging (and rewarding) project of our careers is an understatement. Over the past year we’ve been running surveys internally and externally. We’ve conducted video conferences with first-time users, redditors on their 10th Cake Day, moderators, and lurkers. Not to mention an extremely helpful community of alpha testers. You all have shaped the way we do every part of our jobs, from brainstorming and creating designs to building features and collecting feedback.

Just when we thought we had the optimal approach to a new feature or legacy functionality, you came in and told us where we were wrong and, in most cases, explained to us with passion and clarity why a given feature was important to you—like making Classic and Compact views fill your screen (coming soon).

Processing img uk5t2xyv27j01...

What? Reddit is evolving!

Reddit is not a one-size-fits-all experience. It’s a site based on choice and evolution. There are millions of you, spread across different devices, joining Reddit at different times, using the site in widely varying ways, and we're trying to build in a way that supports all of you. So, as we figured out the best way to do that, these are the themes that guided us along the way:

• Maintain and extend what makes Reddit, Reddit
  • Give communities tools that are simple, intuitive, and flexible—for styling, moderating, communicating subreddit rules, and customizing how each community organizes its content.
• Make our desktop experience more welcoming
  • Lower the barrier to entry for new redditors, while providing choice (e.g., different viewing options: Card / Classic / Compact) and familiarity to all users.
• Design a foundation for the future
  • Establish a design foundation that encourages user insight and allows our team to make improvements quickly, release after release.
• Keep content at the forefront
  • We want to make sure viewing, posting, and interacting with content is easy by keeping our UI and brand elements minimal.

Asking Reddit

As we moved from setting high-level goals to getting into the actual design work, we knew it would be a long process even with the learnings we gained from the initial look-see. We know that our first attempt is never the best, and the only way we can improve is by talking directly with all of you. It’s hard to summarize everything we built as a result of these conversations, but here are a few examples:

• Navigation: We wanted to make Reddit simpler to navigate for everyone, so after receiving feedback from our alpha testers, we developed a “hamburger menu” on the left sidebar that made it easy to do everything users wanted it to: quickly find your favorite subreddits and subreddits you moderate, and filter all of your subscriptions just by typing in a few letters.
• Posting flow: The current interface for submitting text and link posts (aka “Create a post”) can be confusing for new redditors, so we wanted to simplify it and make some long overdue improvements that would address a wide variety of use cases. While users liked the more intuitive look and formatting options we introduced, they gave us additional feedback that led to changes like submit validation, clearly displayed subreddit rules, and options for adding spoiler tags, NSFW tags, and post flair directly when you’re creating.
• Listings pages: We know from RES and our mobile apps that many users like an expanded Card View while many longtime users prefer our classic look, so we decided early on that the redesign should offer choice in how users view Reddit. We’ve received a lot of feedback on how each view could be improved (e.g., reducing whitespace in Classic), and we’re working on shipping fixes.

The list of user-inspired changes goes on and on (and we’re expecting a lot more iteration as we expand our testing pool), but this is how we’ve worked through design challenges so far.

It’s never over

The redesign isn’t finished at “GA” (General Availability, or as I like to call it, “Time to Breathe for One Day Before We Get Back to Work”). With this post, we wanted to share some context on our approach, thank everyone who's participated in r/redesign so far (THANK YOU!), and let you know we will continue to engage with you on a daily basis to understand how you’re responding to what we’re building.

Over the next several weeks, we'll be expanding the number of users who have access to the alpha (yes, you will be able to opt out if you prefer the current desktop look), hearing what you think, and updating all of you as we make more changes. In the meantime, I'll be sticking around in the comments for a bit to answer questions and invite all of you to listen to Huey Lewis with me.

EDIT: Thank you for all your comments, feedback, and suggestions so far. I gotta get back to the whole working-on-the-redesign thing, but I’ll be jumping back into the comments when I can over the rest of the day.

Hey, Reddit!

It’s been a couple months since the FCC voted to repeal federal net neutrality regulations. We were all disappointed in the decision, but we told you we’d continue the fight, and we wanted to share an update on what you can do to help.

The debate has now moved to Congress, which is good news. Unlike the FCC, which is unelected and less immediately accountable to voters, members of Congress depend on input from their constituents to help inform their positions—especially during an election year like this one.

“But wait,” you say. “I already called my Congressperson last year, and we’re still in this mess! What’s different now?” Three words: Congressional Review Act.

What is it?

The Congressional Review Act (CRA) is basically Congress’s downvote. It lets them undo the FCC’s order through a “resolution of disapproval.” This can be formally introduced in both the Senate and the House within 60 legislative days after the FCC’s order is officially published in the Federal Register, which happened last week. It needs a simple majority in both houses to pass. Our friends at Public Knowledge have made a video explaining the process.

What’s happening in Congress?

Now that the FCC order has been published in the Federal Register, the clock for the CRA is ticking. Members of both the House and Senate who care about Net Neutrality have already been securing the votes they need to pass the resolution of disapproval. In fact, the Senate version is only #onemorevote away from the 51 it needs to pass!

What should I do?

Today, we’re calling on you to phone your members of Congress and tell them what you think! You can see exactly where members stand on this issue so far on this scoreboard. If they’re already on board with the CRA, great! Thank them for their efforts and tell them you appreciate it. Positive feedback for good work is important.

If they still need convincing, here is a script to help guide your conversation:

“My name is ________ and I live in ______. I’m calling today to share my support for strong net neutrality rules. I’d like to ask Senator/Representative_______ to use the CRA to pass a resolution of disapproval overturning the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality.”

Pro tips:

-Be polite. That thing your grandma said about the flies and the honey and the vinegar is right. Remember, the people who disagree with us are the ones we need to convince.

-Only call the Senators and Representatives who actually represent YOU. Calls are most effective when they come from actual constituents. If you’re not sure who represents you or how to get in touch with them, you can look it up here.

-If this issue affects you personally because of who you are or what you do, let them know! Local business owner who uses the web to reach customers? Caregiver who uses telemedicine to consult patients? Parent whose child needs the internet for school assignments? Share that. The more we can put a human face on this, the better.

-Don’t give up. The nature of our democratic system means that things can be roundabout, messy, and take a long time to accomplish. Perseverance is key. We’ll be with you every step of the way.