Reddit CPO talks new features: better translations, moderation and dev tools
Itās a big year for Reddit. After its IPO, the platform is planning a slew of product features for the year ahead, and ā spoiler alert ā most of them are powered by AI.
āI think the IPO was an important milestone, but weāre just focused on building for our users,ā Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Baht told TechCrunch.
Redditās product roadmap includes faster loading times, more tools for moderators and developers, and an AI-powered language translation feature to bring Reddit to a more global audience.
āThis is actually a really cool use of LLMs, where we can do translations in a more nuanced way than ever before,ā Baht said. āIf youāre in, letās say, France, you will be able to use Reddit in French, regardless of what most of the users of that subreddit might be.ā
So, if a user posts in French, an English-speaking Redditor could read the post in English and respond ā and the French speaker could see their response in their own language and respond in kind.
āFor the longest time, Reddit was largely an English-only platform, and focused heavily on the United States, United Kingdom, and Mexico,ā Baht said. āWeāre now expanding dramatically across the world, and weāve already had a significant number of users coming in from the rest of the world.ā
If youāre an investor in Reddit, thatās probably music to your ears. But Baht has the data to back it up. According to Redditās IPO filing, in December 2023, 50% of Redditās daily active unique users were from non-U.S. countries.
AI is also at the heart of Redditās updates to the moderator experience. Reddit recently rolled out keyword highlighting features that make it easier for mods to find potentially violative content in their subreddits, along with tools to manage influxes of new members. The company will build on those updates with other new tools, like an LLM thatās trained on moderatorsā past decisions and actions.
Reddit sparked mass user protests last year when it changed its API pricing structure, meaning that some popular third-party Reddit apps would be stuck with seven-figure bills if they continued to operate. This backlash has died down, but now Reddit is encouraging developers to build directly on Reddit, and without pay ā but Baht says this could change in the future.
You can find the products from the developer platform on r/WallStreetBets, where thereās a live dashboard of trending stocks, posters and commenters. And, as Baht notes, one of the most popular Super Bowl scoreboards actually came from r/TaylorSwift ā go figure.
āThe coolest thing is that itās unlocking experiences that we ourselves wouldnāt have imagine,ā he said. āAnd thatās just awesome, and itās all built on top of our API.ā