110 Fun Facts About Reddit

What is a Reddit user called who reads the site regularly but never posts or comments?

A lurker reads along without taking part; Reddit's 2017 overhaul of its logged-out front page was aimed squarely at them and at first-time visitors.

Before Reddit, its founders pitched which idea, only for their startup incubator to turn it down?

Ordering food by text message was the plan for My Mobile Menu; the investor who rejected it invited the pair back to brainstorm, and Reddit was the idea they left with.

In which programming language did Steve Huffman originally code Reddit?

Common Lisp was Huffman's pick in 2005, but that December the team rewrote the whole site in Python, finding the new code shorter and far easier to maintain.

How did Reddit's founders make the site look busier in its early days?

Hundreds of fake accounts did the job: the two founders submitted links under a new username each time because, as Steve Huffman put it, a blank site 'looks like a ghost town'.

Which startup founded by Aaron Swartz merged with Reddit in the site's first year, making him a co-owner?

Infogami and Reddit came from the same startup class; the merger gave Swartz a share equal to each founder's, but he was pushed out in January 2007, months after the site was sold.

Which magazine publisher bought Reddit on October 31, 2006?

Condé Nast, publisher of Wired and The New Yorker, bought Reddit on October 31, 2006, sixteen months after the site's June 2005 launch; the team then moved to San Francisco.

What is the name of the alien mascot in Reddit's logo?

Snoo began as a doodle Alexis Ohanian drew while bored in a marketing class; the name plays on 'What's new?', a fit for a site built to share news links.

What colour are the eyes of Reddit's alien mascot in the site's official logo?

Orange-red is Reddit's signature shade, used for the mascot's eyes and the logo's speech bubble; the alien's plain white body has let hundreds of communities restyle it as their own.

The name 'Reddit' is a play on which phrase?

Read it, in the past tense: the pun lets a user say 'I read it on Reddit', which is why the name is spelled with 'Red' and not 'Read'.

On Reddit, what do the letters of the tag 'NSFW' stand for?

Not safe for work: the tag warns that a post may be explicit or offensive, and communities marked this way are kept off the front page shown to logged-out visitors.

What is the status score that Reddit users earn from their posts and comments called?

Karma rises and falls with the votes on what you post; it is mostly street cred, but a minimum can be required before an account may post in some communities or start its own, which deters spammers.

What do redditors call the anniversary of the day their account was created?

A redditor's cake day is the anniversary of the account's creation; a small slice-of-cake icon appears beside the username for that day.

Which subreddit became Reddit's default front page for logged-out visitors in 2017, replacing a hand-picked list?

r/popular pulls top posts from almost every community instead of a curated set of defaults, though it leaves out adult content and communities that opted out of r/all.

What happens to a Reddit post archived after six months?

Voting and comments close once a post is archived; since 2021 a community's moderators have been able to switch archiving off and keep older threads open.

What is Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman's well-known Reddit username?

u/spez is Huffman's handle; in 2023, users angry at Reddit's new API fees covered the shared r/place canvas with messages insulting spez by name.

What was the ad-free premium membership called before it was renamed Reddit Premium in 2018?

Gold launched in July 2010 to help pay for Reddit's servers without running more ads; after the 2018 rename, the word lived on as one of the awards users could give each other.

Which digital currency did Reddit begin accepting for its premium membership in February 2013?

Bitcoin payments arrived in February 2013 through the processor Coinbase; a decade later, in late 2023, Reddit shut down its own blockchain reward tokens, Community Points.

In 2018, r/thanosdidnothingwrong marked the film Avengers: Infinity War by doing what to half its members?

Banning them at random mimicked the film's villain, who wipes out half of all life; members had begged for the purge, and the moderators carried it out that July.

What was the catch in The Button, Reddit's 2015 April Fools' experiment?

One press each was the rule, and the colour of the badge it earned depended on how far the timer had run down, so users agonised over when to spend their single click.

Which sitting US president took questions from users in a Reddit 'Ask Me Anything' session?

Barack Obama logged on in August 2012 during a re-election campaign stop; Donald Trump's Reddit Q&A four years later came while he was still a candidate.

What could the small chat rooms in Robin, Reddit's 2016 April Fools' experiment, vote to do?

Merge with another group: each winning 'Grow' vote doubled a chat's size, while a 'Stay' vote ended the chat and gave its members a community of their own.

RedditGifts began in 2009 with what event, which grew into a Guinness World Record holder?

A Secret Santa among redditors in 2009 grew into the largest online gift exchange Guinness had recorded, and Bill Gates signed up as a Santa more than once.

Which two pieces of proposed US legislation prompted Reddit's 12-hour blackout on January 18, 2012?

SOPA and PIPA, the Stop Online Piracy and PROTECT IP acts, were pulled from further votes two days after thousands of sites went dark or posted protest banners.

Which comedian's October 2010 rally in Washington grew partly out of a Reddit campaign?

Stephen Colbert's march grew from a Reddit push for a 'Restoring Truthiness' rally; to get his attention, supporters gave more than $100,000 in a day to DonorsChoose, a school charity on whose board he sat.

Alexis Ohanian was the founding controlling owner of which women's soccer club that began play in 2022?

Angel City FC changed hands in 2024, when Disney chief Bob Iger and his wife, Willow Bay, bought control at a $250 million valuation and Bay took over Ohanian's seat as controlling owner.

What nickname was given to the July 2015 moderator blackout over the firing of the staffer who ran Reddit's celebrity Q&As?

AMAgeddon, a blend of AMA and Armageddon, saw moderators set scores of the site's biggest communities to private after Victoria Taylor's dismissal; interim CEO Ellen Pao resigned eight days later.

Reddit was based in which US city before its 2006 sale moved the whole team to San Francisco?

Boston was home because the founders had moved there for the startup programme that first funded them; after the sale, all four employees relocated to the West Coast.

Why did CEO Yishan Wong say he resigned in 2014?

A dispute over moving the offices to Daly City, just south of San Francisco, ended his tenure: the board said it never asked him to go, and Wong admitted he was relieved to leave a draining job.

Before the 2018 redesign, Steve Huffman said newcomers to Reddit were greeted by a 'dystopian' version of which site?

Craigslist was his shorthand for a bare scrolling list of links; the redesign answered it with a card view that opens photos and videos in the feed, much as Facebook does.

Which third-party app did Reddit buy in October 2014 to become its official iOS app?

Alien Blue's sole developer, Jase Morrissey, joined Reddit in the deal, and the app kept its own name as the official iOS client until a rebuilt Reddit app replaced it.

Which service was Reddit's de facto image host until it launched its own uploader in 2016?

Imgur was an outside service that redditors simply adopted; once Reddit launched its own image uploader in 2016, and a video one in 2017, posts no longer had to send readers off the site.

The 2023 film Dumb Money, about Reddit traders and GameStop, was adapted from which Ben Mezrich book?

The Antisocial Network was sold to Hollywood before it was written: MGM bought Mezrich's proposal within days of the squeeze, months before the finished book came out.

Which Chinese company's 2019 investment in Reddit prompted a flood of Tiananmen and Winnie the Pooh posts?

Tencent led a $300 million funding round in February 2019 with a reported $150 million stake; fearing censorship, users flooded the front page with Tiananmen Square and Winnie the Pooh posts.

According to a long-running redditor catchphrase, when does the narwhal bacon?

At midnight: the nonsense line was coined in 2009 as a spoken password, a way for redditors to identify one another in public, and it lived on as a running in-joke.

Where did Reddit begin trading on March 21, 2024, under the ticker RDDT?

The NYSE listing came with an unusual offer: Reddit let some of its top users and moderators buy shares at the IPO price, a privilege normally kept for big investors and insiders.

Which company's February 2024 deal to license Reddit content for AI training was reportedly worth about $60M a year?

Google's deal, reportedly worth about $60 million a year, gave it real-time access to Reddit posts for training AI; in return, Reddit could use Google's AI to improve its own search.

Alexis Ohanian quit Reddit's board in June 2020 with what request?

That he be replaced by a Black candidate was Ohanian's request amid the George Floyd protests; within a week Reddit gave the seat to Michael Seibel, its first Black board member.

Which travel startup did Steve Huffman co-found after leaving Reddit in 2009?

Hipmunk, the flight and hotel search site with a chipmunk mascot, was sold to Concur in 2016, and its new owner shut it down in January 2020.

Which Y Combinator president led the $50 million funding round Reddit announced in September 2014?

Sam Altman did more than invest: weeks later, when CEO Yishan Wong quit, he ran Reddit himself for eight days until an interim chief was named.

Which 2014 documentary tells the story of Reddit co-owner and activist Aaron Swartz?

The Internet's Own Boy premiered at Sundance in January 2014, a year after Swartz's death; it retells his life through family and friends and argues that the federal case against him went much too far.

On Reddit, what does the abbreviation 'OP' stand for?

Original poster: whoever started the thread. Reddit marks every comment that person makes beneath it with an 'OP' label or a microphone icon, so readers can tell when the author replies.

Reddit's 'Collectible Avatars', launched in July 2022, are backed by which blockchain?

Polygon, an Ethereum-compatible blockchain, was picked for its low transaction costs; Reddit's announcement called the avatars 'blockchain-backed' and never once used the term NFT.

As a schoolboy in 1999, Aaron Swartz, later a Reddit co-owner, built a site anyone could add to, like which future giant?

Wikipedia launched in 2001; Swartz's Info Network, a user-written encyclopedia he had built two years earlier, ran on the same idea but never took off.

Which lip-sync video app did Reddit acquire in December 2020 to boost its own video tools?

Dubsmash's tools were folded into Reddit's own video features, and the standalone app was shut down in February 2022, little more than a year after the purchase.

What did Steve Huffman admit doing to comments that insulted him on a pro-Trump subreddit?

Secretly editing them: he swapped his own username for those of the forum's moderators, then conceded that as CEO he 'shouldn't play such games' and promised not to do it again.

What was unusual about Reddit's first Super Bowl commercial in 2021?

Its five-second length left room for one card: 'If you're reading this, it means our bets paid off', a salute to the underdog traders of the GameStop frenzy days earlier.

Which early-stage venture firm did Alexis Ohanian co-found with Garry Tan in 2011?

Initialized was started by Ohanian, Garry Tan and Harj Taggar; in 2016 Ohanian gave up his partner's seat at Y Combinator to help raise the firm's third fund.

Which tennis champion is Alexis Ohanian married to?

Serena Williams met Ohanian by chance in 2015, when the tournament she was playing in Italy and the tech conference he was addressing shared a hotel; he proposed late the following year.

What is the title of the 2013 book by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian?

Without Their Permission is part memoir, part startup manual: its title sums up Ohanian's case that the internet lets anyone launch an idea without asking first. It reached fourth on The Wall Street Journal's business list.

Which 'uncorporation' selling geeky merchandise for charity did Alexis Ohanian launch in 2007?

Breadpig took its name from an expired web address that Reddit's founders bought purely because it was funny; the company published the first xkcd book and gave its profits to charity.

Aaron Swartz helped write the specification for which web technology at the age of 14?

RSS 1.0 was written by an online working group that Swartz joined as a schoolboy; high school bored him so much that he quit after a single year to study at home and at a local college.

Which Python framework did Aaron Swartz write and then use to rebuild Reddit in late 2005?

web.py was Swartz's own lightweight framework; he wrote that the rebuild was mostly done in one weekend and left the site with less code that ran faster.

Swartz was arrested in 2011 for downloading academic articles from which service at MIT?

JSTOR articles were copied by the million through a laptop Swartz left in an MIT wiring closet; federal prosecutors charged him with wire fraud and computer crimes carrying up to 35 years in prison.

Which online advocacy group did Aaron Swartz co-found in 2010 to campaign against internet censorship bills?

Demand Progress began as Swartz's petition against a 2010 bill to let the government block websites, and grew into a campaign group that helped defeat that bill's successors in Congress.

Ellen Pao became known in 2012 for suing which VC firm for gender discrimination?

Kleiner Perkins won on every count when a San Francisco jury ruled in March 2015; by then Pao had left venture capital and was running Reddit as its interim chief executive.

Which type of content did Reddit ban under Ellen Pao, with other sites following?

In February 2015, under Pao, Reddit banned revenge porn, intimate images posted without the subject's consent, and Twitter announced a similar ban within weeks.

Yishan Wong belonged to which famous group of early employees before Reddit?

The PayPal Mafia is the name PayPal's early staff took after leaving to build YouTube, Yelp and LinkedIn; Wong spent over four years running engineering teams there before joining Facebook in 2005.

What did Reddit call the live-streaming experiment it launched in August 2019?

RPAN, short for Reddit Public Access Network, let redditors broadcast live while viewers upvoted or downvoted the stream; the first test allowed 100 streams at a time, each capped at 30 minutes.

Which engineer, Reddit's first employee in 2005, became its chief technology officer in 2017?

Christopher Slowe joined in late 2005 as founding engineer, left in 2010 for a travel start-up founded by Steve Huffman, then came back to Reddit and took the top technical post.

What do redditors call it when a flood of visitors from a popular post knocks a small website offline?

The hug of death is what small sites call the crash that follows Reddit's attention: one front-page link can deliver millions of views, far more than a modest server can handle.

When Reddit was spun out as its own company, which media group remained its majority shareholder?

Advance Publications, the Newhouse family firm, already owned Reddit's former parent; when the site was spun out as a separate company, Advance stayed on as its majority shareholder.

Which startup investor is credited with the phrase 'the front page of the Internet' for Reddit?

Paul Graham is credited with 'the front page of the Internet', the idea he and the founders brainstormed after he turned down their first pitch; Reddit took the phrase as its tagline.

Why did Reddit ban Unidan, its beloved 'excited biologist', in July 2014?

He rigged votes with secret accounts, upvoting his own answers and downvoting rivals so his replies rose first; Unidan, real name Ben Eisenkop, had been one of the site's best-known users.

Months after the GameStop frenzy, investors valued Reddit at roughly how much in August 2021?

$10 billion was the valuation set by a funding round led by Fidelity; chief executive Steve Huffman said Reddit had not planned to raise money again so soon but could not turn the offer down.

Which AI company's May 2024 deal with Reddit traded data access for AI tools for moderators and users?

OpenAI's May 2024 agreement gave it Reddit's Data API to train its models; in return Reddit got AI-powered features for moderators and users, and OpenAI signed on as an advertising partner.

Reddit Talk, announced in April 2021, was widely seen as Reddit's answer to which buzzy social app?

Clubhouse's live audio rooms inspired a wave of clones in spring 2021, Reddit's among them: at launch only a subreddit's moderators could start a Talk, and listeners raised a hand to ask to speak.

What replaced Reddit's coins and awards system in 2023?

A 'golden upvote' took the place of coins and awards in 2023, but the change did not last: Reddit brought awards back within a year.

Which subdomain of reddit.com kept serving the previous desktop design after the 2018 redesign?

Users who disliked the 2018 redesign could opt out at old.reddit.com, which as of 2024 still served the layout Reddit had grown up with since 2005.

Which subreddit, created in 2011, is famous for deleting most replies for lacking depth and sources?

r/AskHistorians asks for serious, academic-level answers and its volunteer moderators delete the rest; they also ban Holocaust denial on sight, arguing that deniers want a public forum only to sow doubt.

Which country's social media ban for children did Reddit sue to overturn in December 2025?

Reddit asked Australia's High Court on December 12, 2025 to strike down the under-16 account ban two days after it took effect, arguing it stifles the political communication the constitution implies.

Which tagline has r/wallstreetbets long used to describe itself?

'Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal' is the forum's own tagline, and it fits: members post screenshots of huge leveraged options bets and mock themselves as 'degenerates' and 'apes'.

Reddit removed r/wallstreetbets's founder as a moderator in 2020 after he tried to do what?

Trademark the forum's name: Jaime Rogozinski tried it in 2020 after writing a book about the community; Reddit said he was out to enrich himself, and he later sued the company over the name.

In WallStreetBets slang, what does 'tendies' mean?

Gains or profits became 'tendies', short for chicken tenders, because traders joked about the tenders they would buy to celebrate a win; in time the word meant the winnings themselves.

Which actor played Reddit investor Keith Gill in the 2023 film Dumb Money?

Paul Dano played Gill, the regular guy who sank his savings into GameStop and posted about it online; his co-stars Seth Rogen, Pete Davidson and Sebastian Stan took other roles.

Which billionaire sent GameStop shares soaring further with the one-word tweet 'Gamestonk!!' in January 2021?

Elon Musk tweeted 'Gamestonk!!' with a link to the Reddit forum driving the rally on January 26, 2021, and the stock, which had nearly doubled that day, jumped again after hours.

Which brokerage's chief was questioned by Congress after it halted GameStop buying in January 2021?

Robinhood blocked purchases of GameStop on January 28, 2021, blaming collateral demands from its clearing house; Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both attacked the move, and its CEO faced a House hearing.

Which hedge fund needed a $2.75 billion rescue after its bet against GameStop collapsed in January 2021?

Melvin Capital lost 53% in January 2021 as the shares it had shorted soared; rival funds Citadel and Point72 put in $2.75 billion, but Melvin never recovered and closed in 2022.

How did Reddit bring its 2022 collaborative art experiment to a close?

Only white pixels could be placed in the final hours, so the communities defending their artwork erased it themselves and the canvas ended as blank as it began.

On r/changemyview, what do posters award to a commenter who changes their mind?

A delta, the mathematical symbol for change, goes to any reply that shifts the poster's view; the tally shows beside each username, so persuading people becomes a visible badge of honour.

A 2011 Reddit comment imagining US Marines fighting which ancient empire won its author a Hollywood film deal?

The Roman Empire of Augustus was the setting for 'Rome, Sweet Rome', which James Erwin began as a reply to a what-if question; within two months Warner Bros. had bought the idea and hired him to write the script.

Which political subreddit did Reddit ban in June 2020 alongside r/ChapoTrapHouse under new hate-speech rules?

r/The_Donald went in a purge of about 2,000 communities on June 29, 2020, after Reddit rewrote its content policy to ban hate speech, three weeks after popular forums went dark in protest at its lax rules.

Which slogan does the subreddit r/antiwork use for itself?

'Unemployment for all, not just the rich!' is the motto of a forum that began in 2013 as a quiet corner for radical ideas about ending work and swelled into a mass outlet for venting about bad jobs.

Which Fox News host's 2022 interview with an r/antiwork moderator led the subreddit to go private?

Jesse Watters interviewed moderator Doreen Ford in January 2022; the exchange drew such mockery that r/antiwork's embarrassed members revolted and the forum went private the next day.

r/antiwork promoted fake job applications to which company during a 2021 strike?

Kellogg had planned to replace 1,400 striking workers.

Which subreddit did photographer Marc Beaulac start in 2013 after an argument over the office temperature?

r/AmItheAsshole began because Beaulac wanted strangers to tell him whether he had been mansplaining to the women he worked with.

Which game publisher's 2017 reply about 'a sense of pride and accomplishment' became Reddit's most downvoted comment?

Electronic Arts was defending the long grind needed to unlock Darth Vader in Star Wars Battlefront II; players answered with well over 600,000 downvotes, enough for a Guinness World Record.

Redditors swamped a 2007 poll to name a humpback whale 'Mister Splashy Pants' for which organisation?

Greenpeace was tracking the whale to protest Japan's humpback hunt; the joke name ran away with the vote once Reddit and other sites piled in, and the campaigners kept it.

What must r/nosleep readers pretend about every story?

Pretending that it is true is r/nosleep's core rule, 'everything is true here, even if it's not': readers comment as though each horror story really happened. The forum also inspired the NoSleep Podcast.

Which competitor lost much of its audience to Reddit after a botched 2010 redesign?

Digg's 'v4' relaunch of August 2010 arrived riddled with bugs and without features its users loved; they left in droves for Reddit, and Digg never recovered.

Which anti-spam tool did Reddit announce in 2015 it was replacing with ordinary account suspensions?

Shadowbans hid a user's posts from everyone else without telling them; Reddit built them to fight spam bots, then moved to suspensions because real people often never learned they had been banned.

Which link-sharing site did Reddit's first investor launch in 2007?

Hacker News began in 2007 as Startup News and took its present name that August, when its remit widened from start-ups to anything that interests programmers.

How long was the countdown timer in Reddit's 2015 experiment The Button?

The Button's timer counted down from 60 seconds and reset whenever someone pressed it, so every press kept the game alive; Reddit never said what would happen at zero.

The Reddit product manager who built The Button in 2015 later created which hit game?

Wordle was Josh Wardle's next act: after building The Button and other April Fools' experiments at Reddit, he made the word game that the New York Times bought in 2022.

In WallStreetBets slang, what does a trader with 'diamond hands' do?

Holds on through heavy losses: 'diamond hands' refuse to sell however far a stock swings, while 'paper hands' fold at the first sign of trouble; the phrase spread far beyond Reddit, often as a pair of emoji.

Christian Selig, maker of a popular Reddit app, once interned at which company?

Apple took Selig on as an intern before he built his Reddit client for the iPhone; he shut the app down in 2023 after Reddit's new charges for its data left him facing a bill of about $20 million a year.

Which cryptocurrency's Reddit fans paid in 2014 to sponsor a NASCAR car and send Jamaica's bobsledders to the Olympics?

Dogecoin's community raised the money to get Jamaica's bobsled team to Sochi, then $55,000 more to cover Josh Wise's car at Talladega in the coin's logo and the Reddit alien.

During the 2023 moderator blackout, Reddit's CEO likened the protesting moderators to what?

Landed gentry was Steve Huffman's phrase in an NBC News interview, where he said he would change Reddit's rules so that users could vote out the moderators leading the protest.

After the 2023 blackout, r/pics and r/aww voted to allow only posts about which comedian?

John Oliver won landslide polls in both forums, a tongue-in-cheek way to reopen as Reddit wanted while keeping the protest alive; the comedian joined in on Twitter.

Which website's 2012 exposé unmasked violentacrez, moderator of some of Reddit's most notorious forums?

Gawker's Adrian Chen identified the user as Texas programmer Michael Brutsch, who was fired the next day; in protest, several big Reddit forums banned links to the site.

Which subreddit was among five banned on June 10, 2015, under an anti-harassment policy?

r/FatPeopleHate, with about 150,000 subscribers, dwarfed the other four forums banned that day, none of which had much more than 3,000; Reddit said it was banning behaviour, not ideas.

Which Reddit clone, later shut down in 2020, took in many users after the June 2015 subreddit bans?

Voat was overwhelmed by the influx, which knocked the site offline; it became a haven for groups Reddit had expelled and closed on Christmas Day 2020 when its funding ran out.

In a jab at the Protestant work ethic, what do members of r/antiwork call themselves?

Idlers is the members' name for themselves, a tongue-in-cheek nod to the idle hands that the Puritans feared.

Which cinema chain's shares did Reddit traders send soaring days after GameStop in January 2021?

AMC Theatres was squeezed on January 27, 2021; its new shareholders called themselves 'apes', and the company later listed a class of shares under the ticker APE in a nod to them.

Hacked celebrity photos that spread via Reddit in 2014 were stolen from accounts on which online storage service?

iCloud accounts were broken into one at a time through targeted attacks on passwords and security questions, not a breach of the service itself, its maker said after a 40-hour investigation.

What is the name of Reddit's rule-based moderation bot, created in 2012?

AutoModerator, written by Chad Birch in 2012 and built into Reddit in 2015, lets moderators set rules that automatically remove, flag or reply to posts and comments.

In which role did Alexis Ohanian return to Reddit in November 2014?

Executive chairman was Ohanian's title when he came back full-time in November 2014, reporting to an interim chief; his co-founder returned as CEO the following July.

What does Reddit call the status that hides an offensive community from feeds and makes visitors opt in to see it?

Quarantine arrived in August 2015 under returning CEO Steve Huffman as a middle path short of a ban: the forum stays up, but it is hidden from feeds and visitors must click through a warning.

Whose 2012 AMA became infamous when he only wanted to discuss his film Rampart?

Woody Harrelson's February 2012 AMA turned into a public-relations disaster: apparently unaware that 'anything' meant anything, he steered every answer back to his new film.

Which web entrepreneur teamed up with Alexis Ohanian in 2025 to buy back the link-sharing site he founded?

Kevin Rose and Ohanian, rivals in the 2000s, bought the site back in March 2025, promising a relaunch that would use AI to bring humanity back to social media.

On the Reddit forum where strangers judge everyday disputes, what does the verdict 'ESH' mean?

All parties behaved badly is the sense of ESH, short for 'everyone sucks here'; a day after each post goes up, a bot tallies the comments and stamps it with the verdict most readers chose.