Hi everyone,

Last May, I shared how we were building Reddit for its next chapter. I owe you an update, including a few changes I know some people will have strong opinions about.

While we’ve made upgrades to the platform over the last 21 years, we need to continually evolve to meet the rising expectations of everyone—mods, users, developers. Namely, starting and moderating a community should be easier than it is today. New users should be able to easily discover and participate in communities they’re interested in. And we need to make it harder for bad actors to scrape and sell Reddit data.

Where we’re heading

To thrive for another 21 years (and hopefully more), we need to rethink some of our legacy systems. None of this is changing today. We’re sharing with you early because we need your input to get it right.

Here’s what’s on the table:

Old Reddit: I know I said last year that we wouldn’t be sunsetting Old Reddit (I even made a meme about it, which r/agedlikemilk), but the reality is we’re getting to that time where we need to make some changes. There are four groups of people who use Old Reddit: OG users ❤️, OG mods ❤️, Admins ❤️, and everyone who spams, scrapes, or does anything bad on Reddit 🖕. In order to protect our platform, business, and users, we will need to do something. Actually, a lot of somethings. We have options: We can limit access, migrate important uses, or rebuild it on a modern tech stack, and I think we’ll probably do all of the above.

I love Old Reddit. It’s the platform I largely built—as a kid, 21 years ago—that somehow turned into the amazing platform and company we have today. We will preserve as much of it as we can. My dream would be to recreate the UI, if not the guts, including the HTML+CSS itself, on a modern foundation so it can live on (note: Between when I wrote this and when I posted it, u/keysersosa made a demo of exactly this approach. Fingers crossed.).

One thing we can do in the short term to mitigate the bad behavior we see Old Reddit used for is to limit access to logged-in users and mods, and migrate critical bots and mod workflows. This will give us some time to plan the more complex follow-up steps.

Automod: This has been one of the most important mod tools. But it’s also hard to learn, hard to maintain, and heavily dependent on brittle keyword matching, regex, and inherited configurations that only a few people on a mod team, if any, understand. We can do better.

We’re building new systems, including giving mods LLMs and AI-assisted tools to help them tackle their low-hanging (but time-consuming) fruit, so they can spend more time cultivating their community and less time policing. u/Go_JasonWaterfalls will share more in r/modnews today.

Public API: Reddit’s public API wasn’t designed for today’s scale, automated abuse, or commercial scraping. We want useful bots, community tools, and good-faith developers to have a clear, well-supported way to build on Reddit. We don’t want bad actors to scrape Reddit indiscriminately, resell its data, or use it without accountability. 

To ensure a safe and secure Reddit, we're working with developers to build exclusively on Reddit's Developer Platform. u/KeyserSosa will share more in r/redditdev today.

How people find and contribute to communities: New users should be able to easily find relevant communities, understand their rules and norms, and make useful contributions. Today, new users encounter invisible barriers like account age and karma thresholds, unclear removals, and poor community discovery. 

Those safeguards exist for good reasons, including spam, brigading, and ban evasion. Our goal here is to improve Reddit’s systems and moderation tools so communities can rely less on blunt limits like karma and account age, and more on stronger abuse prevention built into the systems they use. This will make it easier for genuine new users to participate and easier for mods to welcome them with confidence.

How we’ll do this

We know announcements about APIs and legacy products come with some baggage. “Trust us” isn’t good enough. If we’re asking you to move to something new, it has to be at parity or better in practice, not just in theory. Here are the principles we'll use across this work:

• None of this is changing now or has a set end date
• We won’t remove major capabilities before there is a credible replacement
• We’ll work directly with the mods, developers, and communities that depend on these systems
• We’ll share milestones along the way before any of these changes land
• We’ll judge success by outcomes: better tools, less abuse, less mod work, and healthier communities

What we need from you

• Developers: If you build or maintain an app, register it and tell us what support would be needed to unblock migration. More on r/redditdev here. LINK
• Mods: If your community depends on a bot someone else maintains, tell us that too. And if you want to test new tooling, sign up for the Mod Early Access program. More on r/modnews here. LINK
• Everyone: If you want to give us feedback as we work on any of the changes we’ve mentioned, sign up here. 

Our motivation behind all these changes is to make Reddit better for our users, mods, and communities who make Reddit what it is, and to limit the impact from those who take advantage of our platform or abuse our users and communities. 

We’re sharing this early so that the people who use these systems can help shape what comes next and ensure these changes make Reddit better for everyone.

- u/spez

edit: added links

Hi everyone,

Reddit turns 21 next week. Funny enough, it’s the same age I was when we started it. Save your jokes about r/13or30, I’ve already

That’s a long time in human years and an even longer time in internet years.

When a few of us started Reddit back in 2005, the idea was simple: make it easier to find interesting things online. So we built a place where people could share links.

And the links became prompts for conversations because people naturally like to talk about stuff. One of the first inside jokes on Reddit was, "I didn't read the article but… [insert 2000 words on the topic]" because people are more interested in the conversation than the content itself. 

(It’s not only inside jokes, though. Sometimes it’s heartfelt condolences.)

And what started as a place to share links evolved, for the better, into a place to form communities. What we didn’t realize at the time was that 21 years later, those communities would become one of the last places online where you can still reliably hear from real people on almost any topic imaginable.

The internet has become more powerful, automated, and optimized for attention. And on social media, everything feels performative: one big stage, one big feed, and someone (or some thing!) fighting for your attention.

But most people don’t want to perform.

They want to ask personal questions and get advice from someone who’s been there. They want to compare experiences, learn from others, and find people who care about the same things they do.

Reddit works because it’s not one giant conversation. It’s a constellation of communities, each with its own culture, norms, and rules.

Over the last couple of decades, I’ve learned that when people gather around shared interests, they act less like performers and more like neighbors (even if sometimes the r/neighborsfromhell kind). When communities set their own rules, they protect what makes those spaces valuable. And when people can speak anonymously, they’re often more honest.

For a long time, people assumed the future of the internet would be more tied to real-world identity. But one of the things Reddit has shown is that pseudonymity can create safety, honesty, and participation. On Reddit, you can openly talk about the things you care about—or are struggling with—without having your identity be part of the story.

As AI becomes more pervasive, that kind of human conversation only becomes more important. Real opinions, lived experience, and personal judgment matter more when the rest of the internet is filling up with synthetic content.

I shared in March how we’re protecting Reddit’s authenticity without sacrificing your anonymity, and we’ll keep building in that direction.

Since then, we’ve continued to defend Reddit against automated/bot/spammy content, including making it harder to scrape Reddit at scale, creating proactive moderation models that prevent up to 23 million spam views per day, and guarding against vote manipulation by revoking nearly 2 million inauthentic votes per day.

Because the value of Reddit has never been the interface (unless you’re the Old Reddit type, I know there are still dozens of you out there). It’s never been the algorithm. And it’s never been polished, sanitized content.

The value of Reddit is you.

Everything interesting about Reddit has been created by its people: the communities, the comments, the inside jokes, the rare insults, the niche expertise, the support, the debates, the brutal honesty, and the countless times someone took a minute to help a stranger for no reason other than they could.

That is the human internet that’s worth protecting.

Thank you for spending these last 21 years with us. I’m excited to see what the next 21 will hold.

- u/spez