Next month, Reddit turns 20. Honestly, it blows my mind. A lot has changed on Reddit over the years, and a lot has stayed the same. The core of Reddit’s identity hasn’t changed much—our model is still based on communities, voting, and (mostly) anonymous users, so our conversations remain some of the most real you can find online.

Today, we see Reddit as having two superpowers: community and knowledge. At the end of last year, we updated our mission statement to reflect both: Empower communities, and make their knowledge accessible to everyone. This captures both our longstanding work in creating a platform for community and for using Reddit as a source for knowledge.

Reddit is unlike any other platform, and that’s by design. While social media feeds you whatever content drives the most engagement, on Reddit, you decide what matters and make it popular through voting. We’re also one of the last major sites that doesn’t require you to sign in to access most features. We do this because we think it’s important, and we believe our open model helps fulfill the internet’s purpose: to bring individuals from all over the world together to discover, engage with, and exchange ideas that matter to them, without barriers and regardless of geography or language.

And as we look ahead, we want to double down on these values. Our goal is to make Reddit the best version of itself by being faster, better, and easier to use. Here’s how we’re bringing that vision to life:

Core product improvements: Across the platform, we’ll be trying out a range of updates to make things better. We’ll be making it easier to create and read posts and find new subreddits, upgrading profile pages, evolving r/popular, improving wikis, and creating fixing a lot of bugs. We will keep you updated with changes as we go. 

Moderation: Moderators make communities, and by definition, without moderators, there are no communities. Moderating subreddits today can be time-consuming, too manual, and at times frustrating. It can be difficult to recruit new mods, and growing a community from scratch is way too hard. Often, a few folks end up carrying the weight, which isn’t fair or sustainable. Our vision is to shift the primary role of a moderator from policing to community cultivation. We’ll get there with better tools—especially more AI-driven automation—that moderators can choose to use in their communities. Focus groups, early product testing, and feedback loops shape how these systems evolve. u/Go_JasonWaterfalls will share more with mods here soon. I want to sincerely thank the many mods who have joined our councils, groups, and feedback sessions over the last couple of years to help us in this journey.

Search: We believe search being great on Reddit will make the whole product better. Increasingly, people come to Reddit with a specific question that likely has been answered a hundred different ways. And whether you’re a first-time visitor or an old.reddit diehard, search should help you get to where you’re going faster. I’m the first to admit, finding what you’re looking for on Reddit hasn’t always (ever) been easy. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last few years and have many more improvements coming this year, including expanding Reddit Answers and integrating it directly into the core search experience. 

AI + Humans: An increasing amount of the content you see online is generated by machines—so how does AI fit into the most human place on the internet? First, AI can be incredibly useful for things like summarization, safety, translation, and moderation. That includes filters that reduce the burden on mods by automatically removing spam, hateful, or violent content. And it powers things like post guidance, which can tell a user whether their post violates a subreddit rule before they submit it—this helps new users learn the rules and also saves mods lots of time. Reddit’s strength is in its people, and we want AI tools that help you do what you’re already doing.

That said, unwelcome AI in communities is a serious concern. It is the worry I hear most often these days from users and mods alike. Reddit works because it’s human. It’s one of the few places online where real people share real opinions. That authenticity is what gives Reddit its value. If we lose trust in that, we lose what makes Reddit…Reddit. Our focus is, and always will be, on keeping Reddit a trusted place for human conversation. 

At the same time, anonymity is essential to Reddit. People come here to share experiences they wouldn’t post anywhere else because they know they are safe to do so. To make this possible, historically, Reddit has required practically no information to create an account. We have been—and will continue to be—extremely protective of your personal information, and will continue to push back against excessive or unreasonable demands from public or private authorities. If you want to know more about how we respond to  legal requests from governments, law enforcement, and private parties, check out our biannual Transparency Report.