It's a giant yr for Reddit. Post-IPO, the platform is planning plenty of product features for the approaching yr, and – spoiler alert – most of them will probably be powered by AI.
“I believe the IPO was a very important milestone, but we're just focused on constructing for our users,” Pali Bhat, Reddit's chief product officer, told TechCrunch.
Reddit's product roadmap includes faster load times, more tools for moderators and developers, and AI-powered language translation functionality to bring Reddit to a more global audience.
“This is definitely a extremely cool application of LLMs where we are able to make translations more nuanced than ever before,” Bhat said. “For example, when you are in France, you need to use Reddit in French, no matter who nearly all of that subreddit's users are.”
So if a user posts in French, an English-speaking Redditor could read the post and reply in English – and the French-speaking user could see their reply in their very own language and respond in kind.
“Reddit has long been largely an English-only platform, heavily focused on the United States, the United Kingdom and Mexico,” Bhat said. “We at the moment are expanding dramatically world wide and have already got a major variety of users from the remainder of the world.”
If you're a Reddit investor, this might be music to your ears. But Bhat has the info to prove it. According to Reddit's IPO filing, as of December 2023, 50% of Reddit's day by day lively unique users got here from countries outside the United States.
AI can also be at the center of updates to Reddit's moderator experience. Reddit recently rolls Keyword highlighting features that make it easier for mods to seek out potentially infringing content of their subreddits, in addition to tools to administer the influx of recent members. The company will construct on these updates with other latest tools, comparable to an LLM that’s trained on previous decisions and actions by moderators.
Reddit sparked mass protests from users last yr when it modified its API pricing structure, meaning some popular third-party Reddit apps would face seven-figure bills in the event that they continued to operate. That backlash has died down, but now Reddit is encouraging developers to construct on Reddit directly and without payment – but Bhat says this might change in the longer term.
You can find the developer platform's products on r/WallStreetBets, where there may be a live dashboard with trending stocks, posters and commentators. And as Bhat notes, this is definitely probably the most popular Super Bowl scoreboards r/TaylorSwift – Imagine that.
“The coolest thing is that it allows for experiences that we couldn't have imagined ourselves,” he said. “And that’s just great, and it’s all based on our API.”
