As Reddit surpasses half a billion weekly active users, its latest earnings call makes the case that AI will increase the value of real community discussion.
The company announced its plans to invest in automation to improve relevance, safety and advertising outcomes while protecting the conversations, first-hand experiences and debate that distinguish its platform.
CX leaders should recognise the limits of customer experiences built around frictionless but impersonal content, rather than assuming convenience alone will create trust.
Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, said the company believes authentic community interaction will become increasingly valuable as the internet becomes more automated.
“As the internet becomes more automated, the value of authentic human conversation continues to rise.”
"As the internet becomes flooded with synthetic content, people are craving real human perspective. We are the antidote to an automated web."
Reddit Max Makes Relevance More Valuable
In its previous quarter, Reddit demonstrated how AI is reshaping the quality, relevance, and trustworthiness of its CX across the platform, implementing machine learning to improve the customer journey and advertising performance for increased value.
The rapid growth of Reddit Max saw success with this approach as its AI-powered advertising suite grew more than 60% QoQ, achieving a revenue increase of over 150%, helping advertisers reach users in line with the intent and context of Reddit's communities.
By enabling AI to improve relevance rather than simply automate processes, Reddit also introduced Dual Attribution in the previous quarter, giving advertisers clearer evidence of business impact and enabling AI to build a better understanding of how communities influence purchasing decisions.
Jen Wong, Chief Operating Officer at Reddit, explained how the company is using combined measurement signals to strengthen its advertising technology and deliver better outcomes for marketers.
"With dual attribution, we combine our first-party attribution signals with existing mobile measurement partner signals to improve our ML models, campaign optimization, and advertiser outcomes," she said.
Reddit users and advertisers are now seeing AI being used to not only personalize experiences, but also to improve the quality of the data that organizations use to evaluate customer engagement and marketing effectiveness.
For its users in particular, Reddit has applied LLMs in moderation to help new customers become active contributors whilst limiting the amount of spam and malicious behavior.
In fact, the company reported success in Q2 by blocking 23 million spam views per day before they reached a human user, yet user exposure to spam only fell by 20% from January to March 2026.
In order to solve this, AI is being implemented to support healthier discussions by reducing friction for legitimate participation whilst improving the platform's defences against abuse.
Huffman explained:
"Using LLM-assisted moderation, we can help bring in the prospective great user and continually get better at keeping the spammers and other bad behaviors out."
However, its current feed models only capture around 10% of user activity, limiting their ability to reflect fast-moving conversations.
To tackle this, Reddit has announced it is rebuilding these systems to create more timely and personalized recommendations, aiming to create safer participation, stronger trust, and more meaningful insights for advertisers.
Reddit Reaches 500 Million Weekly Users
Despite much of Q2 focusing on AI, the company emphasized that its long-term competitive advantage is human-centered, as authentic discussions will likely become increasingly valuable in the age of generative AI.
Since AI cannot yet easily replicate lived experiences and personal opinions, Reddit is repositioning itself as a core hub for millions of users to collectively answer questions, debate ideas, and share first-hand experiences.
"As the internet becomes more automated, the value of authentic human conversation continues to rise," Huffman notes.
Reddit's responsibility to provide these human-centered services have never been more pressing, as the company now reports seeing half a billion weekly active users and over 130 million daily active users.