Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down ("upvoted" or "downvoted") by other members.

[9] In October 2014, Reddit raised $50 million in a funding round led by Sam Altman and including investors Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto.

[20] Reddit has received praise for many of its features, such as the ability to create several subreddits for niche communities[21][22] and being a platform for raising publicity for numerous causes.

[26] The idea and initial development of Reddit originated with college roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, who attended a lecture by programmer-entrepreneur Paul Graham in Boston during their spring break from University of Virginia.

[57] Wong resigned from Reddit in 2014, citing disagreements about his proposal to move the company's offices from San Francisco to nearby Daly City, but also the "stressful and draining" nature of the position.

[66] Reddit also instituted several technological improvements,[67] such as a new tool that allows users to hide posts, comments, and private messages from selected redditors in an attempt to curb online harassment,[68] and new content guidelines.

Front-page rank—for both the general front page and for individual subreddits—is determined by a combination of factors, including the age of the submission, positive ("upvoted") to negative ("downvoted") feedback ratio, and the total vote-count.

It was only made available for a user named Chris who goes by the alias u/shittymorph, who was known for posting well-written comments, only for them to end with the same copypasta referencing the 1998 Hell in a Cell match between wrestlers The Undertaker and Mankind.

[142][143] Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp but was rewritten in Python in December 2005[144] for wider access to code libraries and greater development flexibility.

[173] In November 2023, Fast Company reported that Reddit began rolling out a comprehensive rebrand, including a new logo, typeface, brand colors, and an updated version of its mascot Snoo, as part of its preparation for a potential 2024 IPO and in response to its expanding user base and global reach.

"[194] Nissan ran a successful branded content promotion offering users free gifts to publicize a new car,[195][196] though the company was later ridiculed for suspected astroturfing when the CEO only answered puff piece questions on the site.

"[199] Reddit's users tend to be more privacy-conscious than on other websites, often using tools like ad-blocking software and proxies,[200] and they dislike "feeling manipulated by brands" but respond well to "content that begs for intelligent viewers and participants.

"[201] Lauren Orsini writes in ReadWrite that "Reddit's huge community is the perfect hype machine for promoting a new movie, a product release, or a lagging political campaign" but there is a "very specific set of etiquette.

[204][205] Since 2017, Reddit has partnered with companies to host sponsored AMAs and other interactive events,[206][207] increased advertising offerings,[208] and introduced efforts to work with content publishers.

[220] Redditors raised more than $100,000 for charity in support of comedians Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear; more than $180,000 for Haiti earthquake relief efforts; and delivered food pantries' Amazon wish lists.

[226] Reddit has been used for a wide variety of political engagement including the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama,[227][228] Donald Trump,[229] Hillary Clinton,[230] and Bernie Sanders.

Reddit created an Internet blackout day and was joined by Wikipedia and other sites in 2012 in protest of the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts.

[221] The campaign was mentioned on-air several times, and when the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was held in Washington, D.C., on October 30, 2010, thousands of redditors made the journey.

Jon Stewart responded by saying that, though it was a very nice gesture, he and Colbert had already thought of the idea and the deposit for using the National Mall was already paid during the summer, so it acted mostly as a "validation of what we were thinking about attempting".

[247] In a message to the Reddit community, Colbert later added, "I have no doubt that your efforts to organize and the joy you clearly brought to your part of the story contributed greatly to the turnout and success.

[285] Reddit communities occasionally coordinate Reddit-external projects such as skewing polls on other websites, like the 2007 incident when Greenpeace allowed web users to decide the name of a humpback whale it was tracking.

[303] Reddit general manager Erik Martin later issued an apology for this behavior, criticizing the "online witch hunts and dangerous speculation" that took place on the website.

On July 2, Reddit began experiencing a series of blackouts as moderators set popular subreddit communities to private, in an event dubbed "AMAgeddon", a portmanteau of AMA ("ask me anything") and Armageddon.

[335] In April 2023, Reddit announced its intentions to charge large fees for its application programming interface (API), a feature of the site that has existed for free since 2008,[336] causing an ongoing dispute.

[350][351] In September, a user named "mormondocuments" released thousands of administrative documents belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an action driven by the ex-Mormon and atheist communities on Reddit.

Bloomberg News pointed out the company's slow reaction to r/watchpeopledie, a subreddit dedicated to videos of people dying in accidents and other situations, and the harassment that accompanied new unmoderated features like icons for purchase and public chats.

[375] On June 29, Reddit updated its content policy and introduced rules aimed at curbing the presence of communities they believed to be "promoting hate",[376] and banned approximately 2,000 subreddits that were found to be in violation of the new guidelines on the same day.

[395][396][397] In January 2025, over 100 Reddit communities banned users from posting links from the X social media site, after its CEO Elon Musk made an arm gesture at a speech which critics claimed was a Nazi salute.

[399] Another study evoked a connection between cognitive and attention dynamics and the usage of online social peer production platforms, including the effects of deterioration of user performance.

[401] A participant-observation study of April Fools' Day 2017 social experiment on r/place identified top-down and bottom-up coordination mechanisms, rules and emergence, and analyzed their relative impact on the collaboratively created artwork, revealing cooperation and conflict, using qualitative and quantitative methods.