115 Fun Facts About Reddit

Which two University of Virginia roommates founded Reddit together in June 2005?

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were joined that November by Aaron Swartz, when his company Infogami merged with the site.

Which startup incubator accepted Reddit's founders into its very first class?

Y Combinator's first class, summer 2005, took Huffman and Ohanian after Paul Graham rejected their text-message food-ordering app My Mobile Menu and told them to come back with a different idea.

In which programming language did Steve Huffman originally code Reddit?

Huffman wrote the original site in Common Lisp; in December 2005 it was rewritten in Python, and Swartz's blog post about the switch drew complaints from Lisp fans.

How did Reddit's founders make the site look busier in its first weeks?

They were embarrassed by how empty the site looked, so they posted under invented names.

Which company founded by Aaron Swartz merged with Reddit in November 2005?

Swartz's wiki-hosting startup Infogami, from the same Y Combinator class, merged with Reddit in November 2005 under a parent called Not A Bug; Swartz was pushed out in January 2007.

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 was doodled by Alexis Ohanian while bored in a marketing class at UVA; he wanted to call it S'new, a play on 'What's new?'.

According to Reddit's 2018 design rules, which of these is Snoo NOT allowed to have?

Reddit's Snoo guidelines rule out fingers: the mascot's hands stay rounded mitten stubs. Snoo's face must remain blank and neutral, and it is genderless so subreddits can restyle it freely.

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

As in 'I read it on Reddit'; user names begin with u/ and community names with r/.

What are Reddit's user-created topic communities officially called?

Subreddits are Reddit's topic communities; users gained the power to create their own in January 2008, three years after the 2005 launch, while comments had arrived in December 2005.

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

Some subreddits require a minimum karma and account age before you can post, to keep out bots and 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 replaced r/all as the default front page for logged-out visitors in 2017?

r/popular became the logged-out default in February 2017; unlike r/all it excludes not-safe-for-work communities and subreddits that opt out of appearing there.

After how long are Reddit posts sometimes automatically archived, closing votes and comments?

Reddit posts are archived six months after submission, closing new votes and comments; since 2021 moderators can switch archiving off for their subreddit.

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

Huffman posts as u/spez; co-founder Alexis Ohanian is u/kn0thing and former CEO Yishan Wong is u/yishan. Other famous accounts include u/Poem_for_your_sprog, who replies in verse.

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

Reddit Gold, launched in 2010, was the ad-free membership; in 2018 it was renamed Reddit Premium and 'Gold' became the name of an award. Subscribers also get the r/lounge subreddit.

Which digital currency did Reddit begin accepting for Reddit Gold in February 2013?

Reddit began taking Bitcoin for Reddit Gold in February 2013 through Coinbase; a decade later, in late 2023, it shut down its own Community Points tokens, including r/CryptoCurrency's Moons.

What was Reddit's 2017 April Fools' experiment where users placed one pixel at a time on a shared canvas?

r/place ran April 1–3, 2017, one pixel per user every few minutes; it returned in 2022 and 2023, when the canvas filled with protests over Reddit's API pricing.

Reddit's 2015 April Fools' experiment, The Button, could be clicked how many times per user?

Each account could press The Button only once; it drew just over a million presses before its timer finally ran out on June 5, 2015, starting Reddit's run of April Fools' social experiments.

On which subreddit do 'Ask Me Anything' interviews traditionally take place?

r/IAmA hosts Ask Me Anything sessions; Barack Obama answered questions there while campaigning in August 2012, and Bill Gates has done several.

Which 2016 April Fools' experiment let Reddit chat groups vote to merge and double in size?

Robin, launched April 1, 2016, dropped each user into a small chat that could vote 'Grow' to merge with another group of equal size, producing rooms thousands strong.

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

RedditGifts' first Secret Santa in 2009 drew over 4,000 redditors; by 2014 roughly 200,000 people in 188 countries took part, including Bill Gates and Snoop Dogg, earning a Guinness World Record.

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

Wikipedia and other sites joined the protest against the Stop Online Piracy and PROTECT IP acts.

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

Stephen Colbert's rally answered Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor; user mrsammercer started the push after dreaming of a Colbert rally, and redditors raised over $100,000 for charity to get his attention.

After which 2013 event did a Reddit sleuthing subreddit wrongly name missing student Sunil Tripathi as a suspect?

After the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, amateur sleuths on Reddit wrongly named Sunil Tripathi; Reddit apologised for 'online witch hunts', and Tripathi was found to have died by suicide weeks earlier.

What nickname did the July 2015 moderator blackout over Victoria Taylor's firing get?

The blackout was dubbed AMAgeddon because r/IAmA, where Taylor had coordinated interviews, went private first on July 2, 2015; more than 300 subreddits followed, and Reddit's interim CEO resigned days later.

Who served as Reddit's interim CEO from 2014 until resigning in July 2015?

Ellen Pao became interim CEO in November 2014; under her Reddit adopted an anti-harassment policy and banned five harassing subreddits in June 2015, and she resigned on July 10, 2015.

Why did CEO Yishan Wong say he resigned in 2014?

Wong said he quit in November 2014 over a dispute with the board about moving Reddit's offices to Daly City, calling the job 'stressful and draining'; monthly users grew from 35 million to 174 million under him.

How did Steve Huffman describe the look of Reddit's old design when explaining the 2018 redesign?

Huffman said the pre-2018 site looked like 'a dystopian Craigslist'; the April 2018 redesign added card and classic views, while users who opted out kept the previous look.

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

Reddit bought Jason Morrissey's Alien Blue in October 2014 and made it the official iOS client, replacing the 2009-era iReddit app; Morrissey joined Reddit as part of the deal.

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

Imgur, built in 2009 as 'a gift to reddit', was the site's unofficial image host until Reddit's own uploader arrived in June 2016; a native video uploader followed in 2017.

Which subreddit was the main organising ground for the GameStop short squeeze in January 2021?

r/wallstreetbets was the organising ground; weeks later Reddit hired its first CFO, Drew Vollero, fuelling speculation about an IPO.

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.

Which Reddit app did developer Christian Selig shut down in 2023 over new API pricing?

Christian Selig's Apollo closed in 2023 after Reddit's new API pricing would have cost it about $20 million a year; thousands of subreddits went private from June 12 to 14 in protest.

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

The NYSE listing opened at $47 a share after an IPO priced at $34, and closed its first day at $50.44, a $9.5 billion market cap.

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

Google's February 2024 deal, reported by Reuters at about $60 million a year, licensed Reddit posts for training its AI models and landed days before Reddit filed publicly for its IPO.

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

Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel was named to the seat; the resignation came in response to the George Floyd protests.

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

Huffman co-founded the flight-search site Hipmunk with Adam Goldstein in 2010, a year after leaving Reddit; the airfare-search startup shut down in January 2020.

Who led the $50 million funding round Reddit announced in September 2014?

Sam Altman led the September 2014 round, which valued Reddit at about $500 million; Peter Thiel, Snoop Dogg and Jared Leto joined, and Altman promised 10% of the shares to users.

How many monthly users did Reddit report having in 2019?

There were more than 138,000 active subreddits out of roughly 1.2 million created.

A 2022 study estimated Reddit's volunteer moderators do how much unpaid work daily?

A 2022 Northwestern University study estimated Reddit moderators put in about 466 hours of unpaid work a day, worth roughly $3.4 million a year, or 2.8% of the company's 2019 revenue.

What did Reddit Chat replace in June 2025?

Private messages had existed since the site's 2005 launch; Reddit Talk was launched in 2021 as a Clubhouse rival.

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

Collectible Avatars are minted on the Polygon blockchain, an Ethereum sidechain, and stored in Reddit's Vault wallet; Reddit avoided the word NFT, but The Verge flatly called them NFTs.

Which company did Reddit acquire in June 2022 to boost its natural-language processing?

Reddit bought MeaningCloud, a Spanish-founded natural-language-processing firm, in June 2022 to sharpen search and content understanding; Reddit's site search had moved to Lucidworks Fusion in 2017.

Which short-video app did Reddit acquire in December 2020?

Reddit bought the short-video app Dubsmash in December 2020 and folded its video tools into the main app; the standalone Dubsmash app was shut down in February 2022.

At what age did Steve Huffman begin programming?

Huffman began programming at age 8; he grew up in Warrenton, Virginia, studied computer science at the University of Virginia, and met Ohanian there.

On what date did evidence surface that Reddit admins had edited comments in r/The_Donald?

On November 23, 2016 Huffman admitted he had edited r/The_Donald comments that insulted him, swapping his username for the names of the subreddit's moderators, and apologised.

How long was Reddit's first Super Bowl commercial, aired in February 2021?

Reddit's first Super Bowl spot, aired February 7, 2021, lasted just five seconds and nodded to the r/wallstreetbets GameStop frenzy; many viewers paused to read it.

Which early-stage VC firm did Alexis Ohanian co-found?

Ohanian co-founded Initialized Capital with Garry Tan and left in 2020 to start his own firm, Seven Seven Six; he was also a part-time partner at Y Combinator.

Which tennis champion is Alexis Ohanian married to?

Ohanian married Serena Williams in New Orleans in November 2017; they live in Florida with daughters Olympia, born 2017, and Adira, born 2023.

What was the title of Ohanian's 2013 book?

Ohanian's Without Their Permission, subtitled How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed, came out in October 2013 and reached fourth on the Wall Street Journal's business hardcover list.

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

Breadpig, Ohanian's 2007 'uncorporation', published xkcd's first book collection and other geeky goods, sending its profits to charities such as Room to Read.

Which web feed format did Aaron Swartz help develop as a teenager?

Swartz was 14 when he joined the working group that wrote the RSS 1.0 specification in 2000; he also helped John Gruber define Markdown's syntax in 2004.

Which Python framework created by Swartz was used when Reddit was rewritten from Lisp?

Swartz's minimalist web.py framework powered Reddit after the December 2005 rewrite from Lisp into Python; his blog post 'Rewriting Reddit' explained the switch.

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

Swartz was arrested in January 2011 for bulk-downloading millions of JSTOR journal articles through a laptop hidden in an unlocked MIT network closet; federal prosecutors charged him with wire fraud.

Which advocacy group did Swartz co-found in 2010, known for fighting SOPA?

Swartz co-founded Demand Progress in 2010 to fight COICA, a precursor to SOPA; its online petitions drew hundreds of thousands of signatures and fed the January 2012 blackout protests.

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

Pao sued Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in May 2012 alleging gender discrimination; a San Francisco jury found for the firm in March 2015, by which time she had joined Reddit as chief operating officer.

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?

Wong was a PayPal engineering manager, making him a member of the 'PayPal Mafia' alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk; he then joined Facebook as a director of engineering in 2005.

What did Reddit call its live-streaming experiment launched in 2019 and shut down in 2022?

RPAN, the Reddit Public Access Network, launched in August 2019 as a limited-hours live-streaming experiment on r/pan; Reddit shut it down in November 2022.

Which Reddit co-founder holds a Harvard physics PhD and became its CTO in 2017?

He returned to Reddit in 2017 after working at Hipmunk.

For roughly how much did Huffman and Ohanian sell Reddit in October 2006?

The 2006 sale brought a reported $10 million to $20 million for a site just sixteen months old; the team then moved from Massachusetts to San Francisco.

Reddit became an independent subsidiary of which publishing group in September 2011?

Reddit was spun out in September 2011 as an independent subsidiary of Advance Publications, the Newhouse family company that also owns its former parent; Advance remained the largest shareholder through the 2024 IPO.

Which Y Combinator founder coined the phrase 'the front page of the Internet' for Reddit?

Paul Graham coined 'the front page of the Internet' while brainstorming with Huffman and Ohanian after rejecting their first pitch; Reddit used the phrase as its tagline for years.

Which community manager, hired in 2008, became Reddit's general manager in 2011?

Erik Martin joined Reddit as community manager in 2008 and ran the site as general manager from 2011 to 2014; Time put him on its 2012 list of the 100 most influential people.

Which feature, launched in 2014, let Reddit users post real-time updates during breaking events?

Reddit Live, launched in 2014, let approved contributors post updates to a single live thread that refreshed automatically, used for breaking news such as the Ferguson protests that August.

What was Reddit's valuation after its $410 million funding round in August 2021?

It went public less than three years later.

Which AI company got API access to train models in exchange for moderator tools?

OpenAI's May 2024 agreement gave it Reddit's Data API for training and for surfacing Reddit content in ChatGPT; in return Reddit received AI-powered tools for moderators and users, and OpenAI became an ad partner.

Reddit Talk, announced in April 2021, was designed to compete with which app?

Reddit Talk, announced in April 2021, was Reddit's answer to Clubhouse: moderators could host live audio rooms inside their subreddits. Reddit shut the feature down in March 2023.

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

In September 2023 Reddit retired coins and the old awards in favour of a single 'golden upvote', later expanded into paid Reddit Gold awards; users had once gifted silver, gold and platinum.

Which subdomain kept serving the legacy desktop design after the 2018 redesign?

The 2018 redesign left the old site untouched at old.reddit.com.

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

r/AskHistorians, created in August 2011, enforces a strict standard: answers must be in-depth and sourced, so moderators remove jokes, speculation and most short replies.

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

Reddit lodged a High Court challenge in December 2025 to Australia's law barring under-16s from holding social media accounts, which took effect on December 10, 2025; Reddit called Australia one of its biggest markets.

Roughly how much did redditors raise for Haiti earthquake relief?

They also raised over $100,000 for the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

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

r/wallstreetbets describes itself as 'Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal'; its members call themselves apes and degenerates, and the forum gained millions of subscribers during the January 2021 GameStop squeeze.

Who founded r/wallstreetbets in January 2012?

Jaime Rogozinski created r/wallstreetbets in January 2012; Reddit removed him as a moderator in April 2020, and he later sued Reddit over trademark rights to the name.

In WallStreetBets slang, what does 'tendies' mean?

'Tendies' means gains or profits, short for chicken tenders, the treat a trader buys with winnings; 'diamond hands' means holding a position through volatility.

Under what Reddit username did Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, post his GameStop bets?

Gill posted as u/DeepFuckingValue, sharing 'YOLO' screenshots of GameStop call options he had bought in 2019; by January 27, 2021 the position showed a value of about $48 million.

What was GameStop's all-time intraday high on January 28, 2021?

GameStop spiked to an intraday high of $483 on January 28, 2021, nearly 190 times its April 2020 low of $2.57, before brokerages restricted buying that morning.

Which app-based brokerage famously halted GameStop buying on January 28, 2021?

Robinhood restricted buying of GameStop and other meme stocks on January 28, 2021, citing clearing-house deposit demands that reached about $3 billion that morning; the halt drew bipartisan outrage and a congressional hearing.

Which hedge fund's short position was mocked in a Chernobyl-themed WSB video in 2020?

The video compared the fund blowing up to a nuclear reactor.

Roughly how many pixels were placed during the 2017 r/place experiment?

About 16.5 million pixels were placed on the 2017 canvas by roughly a million users over 72 hours; Reddit's Josh Wardle conceived the experiment, and over 90,000 people watched its end.

How many colours were in the 2017 r/place palette?

The 2017 palette offered 16 colours on a 1000 by 1000 canvas; the 2022 edition expanded to 2000 by 2000 pixels and 32 colours.

On what date was r/place repeated in 2023?

The third r/place opened on July 20, 2023 and ran five days, breaking from the April Fools' timing of 2017 and 2022; much of the canvas was covered in protests against CEO Steve Huffman.

Roughly how many subscribers did r/The_Donald reach before its 2020 ban?

r/The_Donald had over 790,000 subscribers when Reddit banned it on June 29, 2020 under new hate-speech rules; it had been quarantined since June 2019 and much of its community had already moved off-site.

Which slogan has r/antiwork displayed in its sidebar?

r/antiwork's sidebar slogan reads 'Unemployment for all, not just the rich!'; the subreddit began in 2013 as a home for post-left anarchist anti-work ideology before exploding in 2021.

Which Fox News host interviewed an r/antiwork moderator in 2022, prompting a shutdown?

Jesse Watters interviewed moderator Doreen Ford on Fox News in January 2022; the widely mocked interview led the subreddit to go private briefly and Ford to step down as a moderator.

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

Kellogg had planned to replace 1,400 striking workers.

What debate prompted photographer Marc Beaulac to create r/AmItheAsshole in 2013?

Its members are dubbed 'potential assholes'.

In which month and year was r/IAmA founded?

r/IAmA was created in May 2009; its 'Ask Me Anything' format, where a poster answers questions in the comments, made it one of Reddit's most popular communities.

Which Holocaust survivor, later an animal-rights activist, answered questions on r/IAmA?

Alex Hershaft, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto and founded the Farm Animal Rights Movement, answered questions on r/IAmA; Bill Gates has done multiple AMAs there.

Which Dow Chemical chemist pioneered scientist AMAs as an r/science moderator?

Nathan Allen, a Dow Chemical chemist moderating as u/nallen, launched r/science's Science AMA series in 2014, bringing researchers in to answer questions; the subreddit later passed 30 million members.

What must r/nosleep readers pretend about every story?

r/nosleep's core rule is that everything is true here, even if it's not: readers comment as though each horror story really happened. The subreddit spawned The NoSleep Podcast in 2011.

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

Digg's August 2010 'v4' redesign removed popular features and drove users to Reddit, whose traffic jumped; Digg was sold to Betaworks for about $500,000 in 2012.

Which 2020 April Fools' experiment asked redditors to spot the bot among human answers?

Imposter, launched April 1, 2020, showed players a set of short answers to a question and asked which one was written by a bot rather than a fellow redditor.

Which tech discussion site does Y Combinator operate?

Hacker News belongs to YC, which has launched more than 5,000 companies.

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; it finally reached zero on 5 June 2015, about two months after launch.

Under what username did Josh Wardle create The Button?

Wardle posted as u/powerlanguage, the Reddit product manager who built The Button in 2015 and r/place in 2017 before creating Wordle in 2021.

On what date did the Apollo app shut down?

Apollo went dark on 30 June 2023, the day before Reddit's API pricing took effect on 1 July; Selig refunded remaining subscriptions and said the new costs made continuing untenable.

Apollo's developer Christian Selig had previously interned at which company?

Selig, a Canadian developer, interned at Apple before building Apollo; the app launched on 23 October 2017 after a long beta and was praised for its native iOS design.

Which university student founded Imgur as a side project in 2009?

Alan Schaaf built Imgur in 2009 while studying computer science at Ohio University and posted it to Reddit as a simple image host; he sold the company to MediaLab in 2021.

Reddit's API had been free since which year before the 2023 pricing change?

Reddit's API had been free since its 2008 launch; the June 2023 change introduced charges of $0.24 per 1,000 calls above a free threshold, pricing most third-party apps out of existence.

Which comedian did r/pics and r/aww vote to post about only, after the 2023 blackout?

After reopening, r/pics and r/aww voted to allow only posts about John Oliver, who cheered them on with photos; the 'malicious compliance' mocked Reddit's demand that subreddits reopen.

Which Gawker journalist unmasked the moderator behind u/violentacrez?

Adrian Chen's October 2012 Gawker story identified u/violentacrez, moderator of r/jailbait and r/creepshots, as Texas programmer Michael Brutsch, who lost his job; the exposé sparked debate over outing anonymous users.

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

r/FatPeopleHate, with about 150,000 subscribers, was the largest of five subreddits banned on June 10, 2015 for harassing people off-site; the ban triggered a user revolt against Reddit's leadership.

Which Reddit-like site did some banned users migrate to in 2015?

Voat, a Swiss-hosted Reddit clone, absorbed many users after the June 2015 bans; it shut down in December 2020.

Which subreddit was created the day after the 2013 Boston bombing to identify culprits?

r/findbostonbombers was created on April 16, 2013 and drew tens of thousands of users within days; the subreddit was closed within a week and Reddit publicly apologised for enabling open speculation.

Sunil Tripathi was a student at which university when he went missing in March 2013?

Tripathi, a 22-year-old Brown University student, went missing from Providence on March 16, 2013, a month before the bombing; his body was recovered from the water near Providence on April 23.

Roughly how many private celebrity photos leaked in 2014's 'Celebgate', spread via Reddit?

Nearly 500 private pictures, many of actress Jennifer Lawrence, were posted to 4chan on August 31, 2014 and spread through the subreddit r/TheFappening, which Reddit banned about a week later.

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.

Which two founders returned to Reddit leadership after five years away, in 2014 and 2015?

Ohanian and Huffman came back after five years away: Ohanian as executive chairman in November 2014, Huffman as CEO in July 2015.

In which year did Reddit introduce the 'quarantine' status for offensive subreddits?

Reddit introduced quarantines in August 2015: a quarantined subreddit carries no ads, is hidden from search and feeds, and needs a verified email and an explicit opt-in click to view.

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

Woody Harrelson's February 2012 AMA went sour when he dodged questions to plug his film Rampart; 'Rampart' became Reddit shorthand for a self-serving AMA.

Which co-founder of Digg partnered with Alexis Ohanian to relaunch it in 2025?

Kevin Rose, who co-founded Digg in 2004, teamed with Ohanian to buy the site in March 2025, backed by True Ventures, promising a community-first relaunch.

Ellen Pao co-founded which diversity nonprofit in 2016?

Pao co-founded Project Include in 2016 with Erica Baker, Tracy Chou and others to push tech companies on inclusive hiring; she has been vocal about Silicon Valley's practices.