Do we like Reddit?
Runs the Reddit discussion site, with thousands of topic communities, and sells ads and data licences. Based in San Francisco.
Our score: 4 out of 10. Not yet. The site is useful, but the UK child-privacy fine, the shrinking free access and the selling of user posts to AI firms leave us wary.
Reddit was co-founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, in the first Y Combinator class. Huffman left, then came back as CEO in 2015 after Ellen Pao's exit and the turmoil over the firing of Victoria Taylor. It went public on the NYSE in March 2024, the first big social media IPO since 2019.
In 2016 Huffman admitted he had secretly edited some comments about himself from Trump supporters. In 2023 thousands of subreddits went dark over new API prices for third-party apps, and TechCrunch reported that engagement dipped afterwards. Moderators and developers have felt burned by Reddit ever since.
The money now comes from selling its archive to AI firms. It signed a Google deal worth about $60m a year in 2024, then one with OpenAI. It has sued Anthropic and Perplexity, which both deny wrongdoing. A federal judge let part of the Perplexity case go ahead. Critics note the irony: Reddit is closing RSS and its public API, saying it's fighting scrapers, while selling its own content.
In February 2026 the UK's data watchdog fined Reddit £14.47m. It said Reddit had no robust age checks, so it processed the data of under-13s unlawfully, and had skipped a risk assessment for children before January 2025. Reddit said it would appeal. It is also fighting Australia's under-16 account ban in the High Court, on privacy and free-speech grounds.
So why a 4? Reddit is useful, and the content comes from real people. But the child-safety regulator's finding, the squeeze on free access and the push to cash in on user posts outweigh that. We'd want to see how its appeal goes and how it treats moderators and users before we backed it.