In Reddit We Trust

A World Of Infinite Content

We have written in the past about the impact of technology on decision making and how content curation is a potential solution. The premise is that the amount of content in the world today is growing rapidly and therefore it is increasingly difficult to decide what game to play, article to read, or source to believe. This trend is exacerbated by artificial intelligence (AI), which is accelerating the output of content and even introducing new challenges like hyper-realistic, AI-generated videos, which have made it hard to discern the difference between what is an AI creation and what is real.

This has caused us to create filters to decide what to consume and more importantly what to believe. Trust is a scarce resource and about to become depleted.

Reddit is one company attempting to solve this.

Reddit is a social media platform whose mission is to “bring community, belonging, and empowerment to everyone in the world.” The platform’s core user interface is an internet forum, where communities of all types collaborate, discuss, debate, joke, speculate, and share ideas.

This week, we want to dive into Reddit and highlight what makes it special in today’s environment, why it is growing so quickly, and what may be some of the negative implications of its success.

Reddit Communities Facilitate Trust Enabling Curation

Reddit is growing >60% YoY and the company attributes part of this to people increasingly turning to Reddit as a source they can trust. Note that the word “trust” appears >20 times in their most recent 10-K (Reddit).

Part of Reddit's focus on trust is an initiative to “keep it human”. Reddit is not immune to the influx of AI and bot content, but Steve Huffman, Reddit’s CEO, just announced, “To keep Reddit human and to meet evolving regulatory requirements, we are going to need a little more information.” This is a radical change for Reddit, which has historically required very little information to access the site. However, it also speaks to the importance of authentic human interaction for the trust they curate. Instead of living in a world of regurgitated AI content, Reddit is focusing on humans, their unique perspectives, and authentic experiences to generate content.

While Reddit has worked to cultivate this sense of trust in many ways, we believe that the core driver of trust is its community-led moderation system.

Community-Led Moderation: Community members collectively decide on consensus through a voting mechanism that moves the most accepted posts to the top of the feed (accelerating their visibility) and posts that they disagree with to the bottom of the feed. This creates consensus among members by sifting through posts for what the community believes to be the most accurate. And because users voluntarily participate in these communities, and therefore generally subscribe to the values, discourse styles, and beliefs of the community, users trust the consensus.

A shared belief system creates trust. Community-led moderation creates consensus. And together they allow the user to leverage the platform for curation.

Here is a simple example:

r/ShouldIBuyThisGame is a community dedicated to talking about video game quality and if it is worth purchasing. One user asked about Expedition 33, a newly-released game, and was given an answer that advocated for the game which 624 people upvoted. While this is not a guarantee that the user will like the game, it is a sign of validation that not only hundreds of people approve of the answer, but specifically hundreds of people in a community you respect. If the same user asked the same question in a different community, say r/MobileGames, the responses would have been different because the values of that community are different.

Community Driven Curation Breaks Down With Complexity

While Reddit communities often surface a dominant viewpoint, this mechanism tends to work best when discussions are relatively simple, i.e., when questions can be answered within the bounds of a shared belief system. As topics grow more complex or nuanced, involving competing values or ambiguous trade-offs, consensus becomes harder to achieve. This can be everything from tech regulation to economic policy. In those cases, Reddit’s reliance on community beliefs can become a limitation, oversimplifying discussions that resist easy answers. While Reddit has some mechanisms to help navigate this including a “sort by controversial opinions" filer and “ask an expert” threads, the majority of threads on Reddit break down around complex topics.

When It Works:

• Shared Belief System: Community curation is most effective when you share the values and beliefs of the community who is generating the content (PC gamers vs. mobile gamers).
• Minimal Nuance: Community curation tends to provide the most popular opinion which can be helpful for simple subjects like product reviews, common knowledge, or general perspectives.

When It Breaks:  

• Multiple Belief Systems: In situations where a “correct” answer or solution needs to transcend multiple groups of people with varying beliefs, this style of curation (specifically in a single sub-community) can fail the user by only providing one-sided or biased answers.
• Highly Nuanced: Additionally, the most popular opinion generated by community curation may not be the most accurate. Expert voices can get lost in the crowds, especially on Reddit where users are anonymous.

The types of sources that we trust to help us make different decisions changes with complexity, and the trust placed in any one source may vary depending on the complexity of the topic.

Reddit may be highly trustworthy when asking what video game you should play, but should probably not be a source of information when asking if AI will take all of the jobs in the video game industry. The answer here is more nuanced and complex. It requires a deep understanding of economics, AI, and the video game industry, and cannot be summarized in a few hundred characters. The answers will also vary dramatically depending on if you ask the question in r/ArtificialIntelligence or r/GameDevelopment.

Dangers Of Ignoring Degrees Of Complexity

One of the dangers of community curation is that it fragments the internet into sub-communities and sub-sub-communities, each of which are self-moderated and self-reinforcing. The appeal of these communities is natural: a place where people with the same values and beliefs can gather and get answers to questions that are not bogged down by the breadth of content existing on the internet.

However, this can lead to isolation of thought and shelter us from complex problems and unique perspectives. Open discussion refines ideas.

As we spend more of our time in digital spaces, it will become important to find other products and systems that can generate trust in the way that Reddit has done. However, community-based curation has its limits. We believe Reddit’s “sort by controversial opinions" filters and “ask an expert” threads are a glimpse into future potential to find answers to complex questions, but further expansion and refinement is necessary. We are excited to talk with companies that are helping to create trust while also reintroducing nuance to an increasingly complex world.

Takeaway: Reddit’s rapid growth in today’s content-saturated world is a case study in how community-led moderation and authentic human perspectives can create trust and consensus online, which enables content curation. Reddit communities have a shared belief system that creates trust. Community-led moderation helps to create consensus. And together they allow users to leverage the platform for curation. As the internet becomes overwhelmed by content and an infinite number of opinions, Reddit’s model has made it a go-to source for everyday decision-making.

However, the same mechanisms that enable curation can also lead to isolation and oversimplification. Community-based curation is ill-equipped to handle complex or controversial topics that require nuance, debate, or expertise. Reddit may be a compelling answer to parts of the curation problem, but it is not the whole solution. There is a growing opportunity for new platforms to build trust without limiting perspective, especially in a world where complexity is only increasing.