You Probably Aren’t Using Reddit Enough in Your Comms

On the last human-powered holdout of the internet

If you remember this statue or can explain its crest, congratulations, this post isn’t for you. (PS: The narwhal bacons at midnight.)

By any measure, Reddit is having A Moment:

• The stock has nearly quintupled since its March 2024 IPO. Daily users jumped from 60 million to 108 million in barely a year.

• Google is sending them hundreds of millions of visitors monthly: some estimates suggest a 650% increase in Google-referred traffic.

• The AI gold rush has Reddit at its center, with OpenAI and Google writing checks for access to what might be the last corpus of substantive, authentic human conversation on the internet.

• Even the meme stock traders of r/WallStreetBets are back wreaking delightful havoc on markets.

Yet when I talk to comms people about where Reddit sits in their thinking, I mostly get some version of “yeah, we should probably figure that out.” Leaders might browse it personally and definitely know their company gets discussed there. Still, Reddit remains conspicuously absent from their actual planning or quite low down the priority queue if it does.

This disconnect is pretty fascinating. Here's a platform that Google now treats as the de facto source of human opinion, that every major AI system has trained on, that increasingly drives purchase decisions and cultural moments, and most comms teams are treating it like it's still 2015 and just a place for a handful of guys with neckbeards.¹

Google Gave Up and Chose Reddit

Sad to say, but the story of Reddit's rise is really a story about the rest of the internet's decline. By 2021, Google results had gotten so bad people began appending "reddit" to their searches as a hack to find actual human opinions instead of SEO-optimized garbage. In 2022, Google made it official, tweaking its algorithm to surface Reddit results for anything resembling a question or request for advice. As a result, Reddit’s commercial and social relevance exploded.

This should have been a five-alarm fire for every comms team. When the world's dominant search engine essentially outsources quality control to a platform you're not actively managing, that's a strategic vulnerability. But most teams have focused more on their LinkedIn thought leadership and Instagram engagement rates.

The Google traffic surge is just the visible part of Reddit's influence. The invisible part might be more important.

Every major AI platform has gorged itself on Reddit data. When someone asks ChatGPT about your product, when Claude offers an opinion on your industry, when Perplexity summarizes reviews of your service, all of these responses are influenced by millions of Reddit posts these systems trained on.

Sam Altman (one of the largest holders of Reddit stock at its IPO and its CEO for a hot minute) knew this back in 2015, the day after founding OpenAI, when he mused that "all of the Reddit data would be a very useful training set." He wasn't wrong. Reddit's pre-organized, pre-moderated, community-sorted discussions are basically perfect AI training data. No SEO optimization, no marketing copy (or less of it anyway), just humans talking to humans about what they actually think.

The Reddit threads about your company aren't just Reddit threads or search results anymore. They're the data shaping how AI systems understand and discuss your company for years to come.

Embrace the Mess

The companies that get Reddit right have figured out something most haven't: you can't market your way to Reddit success. You have to actually show up as fully-realized human beings. The less you do, the more you do.

Discord gets this. When their service crashes, engineers show up in r/discordapp with actual technical explanations, not PR-speak about "experiencing difficulties”. They joke around in threads. They admit when features are broken. Their subreddit feels less like a support forum and more like their internal Slack with users invited.

Notion's approach was even more radical. They found Ben Lang spending his nights and weekends evangelizing Notion on Reddit for free, building template sites, launching Facebook groups, just pure product obsession. So they made him Head of Community. He recruited other power users as volunteer ambassadors. No compensation, minimal oversight. Today those same unpaid enthusiasts manage r/Notion's 415,000 members.

Even a traditional CPG brand like Maker's Mark figured it out all the way back in 2014. Their Reddit holiday ad didn't recycle existing creative: they made one specifically for Reddit with the copy “Let it Snoo,” playing on Reddit's mascot. A particularly emblematic response from a commenter: “First time I saw an ad and came to read the comments in three years.”

As the web fills with a sea of AI-fueled sameness and every social platform chases TikTok into algorithmic video oblivion, Reddit's messy, argumentative, deeply human threads are becoming more valuable, more trustworthy. The companies thriving there know that being useful beats being slavishly on-message every time.

The playbook for this isn't complicated, but it does require a mindset shift.

First, accept that there's already a conversation about your company happening on Reddit. If you're not participating, you're just letting it happen to you. But participating doesn't mean having your community manager post approved messages. It means having actual experts—engineers, designers, product managers—engage directly. Your engineer explaining a technical decision will get upvoted. Your community manager posting marketing copy will get roasted.

Second, focus on being useful rather than being on-message. The most successful company presences on Reddit answer questions, share knowledge, and provide value. They don't try to control narratives or push key messages. When a Valve developer explains why a Steam feature works a certain way, it generates more goodwill than any campaign.

Third, embrace the culture instead of fighting it. Reddit isn't LinkedIn. You will get memed. You will get criticized. The companies that thrive can take a joke, admit mistakes quickly and honestly, and engage with criticism constructively. The ones that show up only to defend themselves or push product announcements get nowhere (or worse, as EA found out when they posted the most downvoted comment in Reddit history).

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman frames Reddit it as fulfilling "the promise of the internet"—actual human connection and conversation. That's probably a skosh grand, but he's not wrong about the direction. When everything else is automated, optimized, and artificial, the platform full of humans arguing about whether a hot dog is a sandwich starts looking pretty appealing.

1. Some personal history here: I went to school with Steve and Alexis right before they joined Y Combinator to create Reddit, so I was quite an early user. Back in a prior life when I worked in global health, Alexis and I teamed up to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Haiti earthquake relief via Reddit. I even remember when they sold it to Conde Nast for what seemed like a lot of money at the time—$10 million dollars! [insert Dr. Evil pinky here]