Reddit is one of the largest discussion platforms on the internet, a network of community-run forums called subreddits where users post, comment, and vote content up or down. Founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2024 and reported Daily Active Uniques of more than 100 million by the end of that year.[7] Its content is curated almost entirely by unpaid volunteer moderators, an arrangement that has made the platform both fiercely community-driven and repeatedly combustible.
- In 2020, Reddit shut down 2,000 user forums for breaking new hate-speech rules.
- That shutdown hit both sides: a large pro-Trump forum and a popular far-left one were banned together.
- In 2023, Reddit started charging fees for access to its data, which set off a user protest.
- Reddit sued Anthropic in 2025 over scraping its data without a license.
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is Reddit's third-largest shareholder at 8.7 percent.
Quick Take
Reddit spent 2020 rewriting its content rules and banned roughly 2,000 communities in a single day, including the 790,000-subscriber pro-Trump forum r/The_Donald and, in the same sweep, the left-wing r/ChapoTrapHouse. CEO Steve Huffman has since become one of the most public defenders of charging AI companies for Reddit's data, telling the New York Times the platform's archive is too valuable to hand over for free. The company reported $203 million in aggregate data-licensing contract value in its IPO filing, and its third-largest shareholder is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Reddit's politics are less a stated ideology than a running fight over who controls speech on the platform.
The 2020 Content-Policy Reset
In June 2020, Reddit overhauled its content policy and banned about 2,000 subreddits in one action, the company announced through a post from Huffman. The most prominent removal was r/The_Donald, a pro-Trump community that had roughly 790,000 subscribers and had already been placed behind a click-through "quarantine" warning the year before. Huffman wrote that the forum had repeatedly hosted and upvoted rule-breaking content and that its moderators had refused to meet the company's basic expectations.
The same sweep also banned r/ChapoTrapHouse, a popular left-leaning community tied to the podcast of the same name, which Reddit said violated the identical rules. Reddit stated that the vast majority of the 2,000 banned communities were inactive and only about 200 had more than ten daily users. The action landed the same day Amazon-owned Twitch temporarily suspended President Trump's channel, part of a broader wave of platform moderation in 2020.
The CEO Who Picked a Fight With His Own Users
Steve Huffman, who co-founded Reddit and returned as CEO in 2015, has presided over the platform's two largest user revolts. The bigger came in June 2023, when Reddit announced it would start charging for access to its data API, the connection third-party apps use to operate. The pricing, quoted to one developer at roughly $20 million a year to keep his app running, prompted more than 8,000 subreddits to go dark in protest.
Huffman did not back down. In an internal memo and a series of interviews, he criticized protesting moderators and compared the structure of large subreddits to an outdated "landed gentry," calling for what he described as more democratic community governance. Reddit removed some moderation teams that kept their communities private indefinitely. The company has framed the API changes as a business necessity ahead of its public offering rather than a political act; the dispute is about control of the platform, not partisan alignment.
Where the Money Goes, and Where the Data Goes
Reddit's most consequential recent business story is the sale of its users' posts to AI companies. In its February 2024 IPO prospectus, the company disclosed it had signed data-licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of $203 million. The same week, multiple outlets reported a deal with Google worth a reported $60 million a year, giving Google real-time access to Reddit content for training its AI models and surfacing Reddit posts in search.
The company has also gone to court to enforce those terms. On June 4, 2025, Reddit sued Anthropic in San Francisco Superior Court, alleging the AI firm scraped the site repeatedly to train its models without a licensing agreement of the kind Google and OpenAI had signed.[9] For full-year 2024, Reddit reported $114.7 million in Other revenue, the category that includes its data-licensing business alongside other non-advertising income.[7] The company has stated it wants future deals to pay more as its content becomes more central to AI answers.
On direct political spending, Reddit's federal footprint is thin. The company is not a major corporate political donor, and its disclosed federal lobbying and PAC activity is minimal compared with larger technology firms. As a San Francisco technology company, the partisan tilt that shows up in the public record is concentrated in employee donations, a pattern common across the sector, rather than in any corporate PAC program.
Ownership and Governance
Reddit trades on the NYSE under the ticker RDDT. It uses a three-class share structure: Class A shares carry one vote each, Class B shares carry ten votes each, and Class C shares carry none.[8] Co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman holds high-vote Class B stock, and a voting agreement between Huffman and Advance Magazine Publishers, the Conde Nast parent that is Reddit's largest shareholder, concentrates control regardless of the founders' diluted economic stakes. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, an early investor and former Reddit board member, was disclosed in the IPO filing as holding an 8.7 percent stake, making him the company's third-largest shareholder.[8] Alexis Ohanian resigned from the board in 2020, asking that his seat be filled by a Black candidate, during the period of public reckoning that followed George Floyd's death.
Where to Find Them
Reddit operates at reddit.com and through its mobile apps. The platform is free to use, supported by advertising, a paid ad-free subscription tier, and its growing data-licensing business. It is available worldwide except in countries that block it.
Footnotes
[1] Todd Spangler, Variety, "Reddit Finally Bans Hate Speech, Removes 2,000 Racist and Violent Forums Including The_Donald," June 30, 2020. https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/reddit-bans-hate-speech-groups-removes-2000-subreddits-donald-trump-1234692898/
[2] Sara Fischer, Axios, "Reddit bans The_Donald forum as part of major hate speech purge," June 29, 2020. https://www.axios.com/2020/06/29/reddit-bans-the_donald-forum-as-part-of-major-hate-speech-purge
[3] Wikipedia, "2023 Reddit API controversy," accessed June 15, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy
[4] Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch, "Reddit CEO lashes out on protests, moderators and third-party apps," June 16, 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/16/reddit-ceo-lashes-out-on-protests-moderators-and-third-party-apps/
[5] Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, "Reddit says it's made $203M so far licensing its data," February 22, 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/reddit-says-its-made-203m-so-far-licensing-its-data
[6] CBS News, "Google strikes $60 million deal with Reddit, allowing search giant to train AI models on human posts," February 24, 2024. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-reddit-60-million-deal-ai-training/
[7] Reddit, Inc., SEC Form 8-K, Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Results, filed February 12, 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000171344525000016/earningspressreleaseq424.htm
[8] Reddit, Inc., SEC Form S-1/A Registration Statement, filed March 2024. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001713445/000162828024011448/reddit-sx1a2.htm
[9] Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch, "Reddit sues Anthropic for allegedly not paying for training data," June 4, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/04/reddit-sues-anthropic-for-allegedly-not-paying-for-training-data/
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