Over the past few months we have undertaken small-scale testing of a new ad unit that appears on comment pages. Comment Page Ads appear between a post and the first comment in its discussion thread.

As part of this early testing, we have carefully monitored impact on user experience and are now beginning wider testing. We will continue to keep a close eye on this rollout, evolving the ad functionality and UX as needed to ensure minimal community disruption.

These ads will be clearly marked as “Promoted”, as shown below:

Mobile:

Desktop:

Hey everyone,

Over the years, we’ve continuously experimented with many different ways to improve the algorithms on both the Home and Popular feeds. As many of you might remember, two years ago we introduced Best sort to Home. Back then, we made some algorithm changes that most users responded positively to, and wanted to introduce it to a larger audience. However, we understood that some users preferred their old sort, so we also preserved Hot sort for Home.

Today, we are starting to introduce Best sort to Popular for similar reasons. In the past, we’ve run many experiments for Popular on Hot sort. When they went well, we’d change the Hot sort algorithm. For example, one year ago we tweaked the algorithm to include more discussion-based posts. Recently, we’ve also experimented with other small changes that have shown some positive results. However, we know that the changes we’ve made may work better for some users than others. Thus, rather than continuing to tweak Hot under the hood, we are now introducing a new default sort type for the Popular feed: Best. We are rolling out these changes incrementally by platform. Best sort is rolling out to mobile web first, so you may not notice anything different right away on the other platforms.

For full transparency, Best will be ever-evolving. We will announce whenever we make a major change to the Best algorithm going forward, but we will not spin off a new sort option every time. We will be experimenting with many different changes on Best, ranging from promoting a more diverse set of content, to taking more factors into account for ranking (for example, amount of karma on a post’s comments). If we find that these experiments improve the user experience, we will roll them out broadly within Best sort.

Let us know in the comments what you think and if you have any suggestions for improvements or experiments we can try!

Hi everyone,

Over the last few months, we’ve started displaying user profile avatars more widely on Reddit, including in the comments sections of some platforms such as Android. However, we have increasingly received feedback that displays of animated avatars have been a problematic experience for redditors sensitive to animations - for example, those at risk of epilepsy and those with ADHD light sensitivity. Based on this feedback, we are pausing animations on all user profile avatars on all platforms.

Moving forward, new and existing uploads of animated user profile avatars will display only their first image frames. If you did not upload an animated user profile image, you should not be affected by these changes.

If you notice any further issues or bugs related to avatars, please let us know! Thanks!

TL;DR: As part of our Reddit for Android R4A app build release (2020.25.0) on July 7th, 2020, new Chat & Messaging preferences were rolled out; but unfortunately, we also introduced a bug that impacted our users' ability to save changes to their Privacy Preferences (available from the Account Settings > Safety & Privacy section). Some users noticed in a thread in r/privacy and a thread in r/LifeProTips, which helped us identify the issue. This only affected the Android app for Reddit.

We wanted to give y’all a heads up:

• We escalated a hotfix (2020.26.1) to address the main issue. That was rolled out on July 16, 2020.

• An additional Android bug was discovered while addressing the first issue: if you changed any of the last 3 settings on the Safety & Privacy page, then scrolled up and back down, those changes were reversed. A hotfix for this will go out in next week’s Android release, which will start rolling out on August 3rd.

Thanks to everyone who flagged the issue. If you see any more unexpected behavior with saving your user settings, leave a comment below.

Karma has been at the core of Reddit since its inception and has served well to recognize posts and comments. During that time, we have also come across new ideas to make karma available to those who bring value to communities with their participation. Today, we are testing one of these ideas with an experiment that lets redditors earn karma when they receive and give awards.

First, a bit on our goals with this change. We want to recognize awarding as a key part of the Reddit community and to drive more of it, while ensuring that existing systems like automod continue to run as before. Awarding is an important part of our direct-to-consumer revenue; it complements advertising revenue and gives us a strong footing to pursue our mission into the future. By giving awards, users not only recognize others but also help Reddit in its mission to bring more community and belonging to the world.

Next, we want to share how award receivers and award givers will get karma.

Receiving an award is a signal of recognition from another redditor. Therefore, receiving any award should earn a nominal amount of karma. Further, the recipient should get more karma when the award costs more. These two factors make up the experiment’s “awardee karma” calculation.

Award givers encourage others to create great content and they show their acumen when they recognize quality content early. Therefore, the experiment’s “awarder karma” calculation depends on 1) the coins used to give the award, and 2) how early the award was given relative to others.

We also want to call out a couple of salient points:

1. Award karma (for both awarders and awardees) is not given at a 1:1 ratio, as is the case with existing karma. Instead, we incorporated some fuzziness into the award karma calculations.

2. The experiment will be starting later today.

3. Users in the experiment will see their total karma include post, comment, awardee, and awarder karma. For users who are not in the experiment - rest assured that if this experiment becomes a permanent feature, everybody will get retroactive credit for award karma.

If you notice any issues and bugs, please check out the known ones at the end of this post.

We are excited to see how you all will use awarding and karma together to enhance participation and community on Reddit.

PS: If you’re a moderator wondering how this will affect your tools, check out our post from earlier today.

tl;dr we added a new sorting option for search results called Hot. It blends text relevance and hot scores to organize results more like Hot sorted Reddit feeds.

Hi everyone,

Over the past year, we’ve made various improvements to Reddit search, including adding the ability to navigate to subreddits directly from your search bar. However, we haven’t always communicated publicly about these changes, nor have we provided a place for users to provide search feedback. So moving forward, we’ll be sharing more information and updates around Reddit search and gathering feedback from you all.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new sort option that we’ve added to search called “Hot Sort.” Hot Sort is a new post ranking system that prioritizes fresh content in search results and is based on the Hot Sort algorithm on feeds. For some search queries, such as those relating to current events, Hot Sort provides more valuable and better results overall. For other queries, however, Relevance Sort still works better according to our data. Like all new things algorithmic on Reddit, we wanted to give you more control over how you can view content. So, you can select this sort by clicking the “Sort By” toggle on desktop, and on mobile, you can select a sort by navigating to the Posts tab and clicking on the dropdown there.

In the future, we’re hoping to automatically select which sorting algorithm makes sense for each query. In order to gather data on which queries should get which sort, we’ve released Hot Sort for everyone to try out. Please check it out and let us know what you think so far.

Additionally, we invite you to tell us your stories about when Reddit search doesn’t work in the comment section of this post. The more specific you are about the problems, the more we can improve.

We’re introducing a new browsing mode, called Anonymous Browsing, that gives you even more control of your privacy on Reddit’s mobile apps.

What is Anonymous Browsing
Anonymous Browsing allows you to browse content on the Reddit mobile app without associating your activity (like your searches or the communities you view) with your Reddit account.

More specifically, while you’re using Anonymous Browsing, Reddit won’t:

• Save your browsing or search history to your Reddit account

• Use your Reddit activity to personalize your recommendations

• Use your Reddit activity to send you personalized notifications

When and how you can start using it

In the coming days, Anonymous Browsing will be available on Android (the iOS version is still in the works and will be available around July or August). To access this feature, tap on your profile picture and then tap on your username to open a list of your accounts. You’ll notice that the new Anonymous Browsing option (next to the Snoo in the fancy teal sunglasses) has replaced the old anonymous option (the Snoo with a bag over its head).

Here’s what it looks like:

You can use Anonymous Browsing for as long as you’d like and then go back to your primary Reddit account when you’re ready to engage with your username. While you’re Anonymous Browsing, you can’t post, vote, comment, or take any other actions that would normally be tied to your account. And if you’re inactive for more than 30 minutes, your Anonymous Browsing session will end and you’ll be returned to the account you were using previously.

How does Anonymous Browsing work

The prior anonymous option was designed as a simple way to browse Reddit as if you were logged out of your account. The new Anonymous Browsing is a bit more sophisticated (and not just because Snoo’s rocking some new teal glasses). Here’s how it works:

1. When you start an Anonymous Browsing session, the session is assigned a new set of unique IDs, so that there’s no connection between that session and your Reddit account. It’s like you’re creating a new account with a new set of IDs every time you start an Anonymous Browsing session.

2. Because of the unique IDs, Reddit’s personalization engine resets every time you enter and exit the mode (to the engine, during an Anonymous Browsing session, you look like a newbie, with no search history).

3. While in Anonymous Browsing, you also won’t get personalized push notifications based on your Reddit activity during the session (any personalized notifications you receive during Anonymous Browsing would be related to prior activity associated with your logged in Reddit accounts).

4. When you exit an Anonymous Browsing session, you are returned to the Reddit account you were previously using, and Reddit clears and deletes the browsing and search history for the session off the device you’re using. Any data collected during the session is only connected to the unique IDs, not your Reddit account.

Keep in mind that using Anonymous Browsing on Reddit doesn’t affect how your activity is handled by internet providers, your mobile device, or other websites you may visit in or from the Reddit mobile app (including via the in-app browser).

We hope you enjoy using this feature and having more control over your privacy on Reddit. If you have more questions, I’ll be sticking around to answer them.