Reddit Lowers Posting Barriers, Expands AI Moderation Tools; Q2 Revenue $805 Million

Reddit has announced a series of infrastructure and tool upgrades aimed at lowering the barrier to participation, guarding against web crawlers and spam, and assisting community moderators with content management. The initiative is intended to make it easier for new users to post while improving platform security. Karma, Reddit's digital reputation system, allows users to earn points by posting helpful, friendly or humorous content, thereby raising their score. Reddit now wants to shift to a more powerful, built-in abuse-prevention system to take on more of the moderation workload, so that communities can remain open to new users. The company has not explicitly said it will do away with Karma entirely, but it signalled that its importance will diminish. Reddit is expanding the test of its AI-driven moderation tool, the Rules Hub, which assists moderators by deciding when to automatically enforce certain community rules. Initially used in more than 700 communities, the tool is now available for testing in all new communities and will be rolled out fully to both new and existing communities later in 2026. The Rules Hub uses large language models to judge whether a post or comment is consistent with the intent of a rule, handling linguistic nuances and edge cases. Reddit has also expanded other tools, including one that informs users of community rules when they post and comment, and another that helps members set personal flairs. Flairs are custom identity markers that appear only within the community where the content is posted. Reddit explained that new users often encounter account-age and karma thresholds, unclear removal reasons and poor community discovery experiences. The company hopes new users around the world can easily find relevant communities, understand the rules and contribute. Reddit announced changes to the classic desktop version of the site, Old Reddit, migrating administrator workflows to a new architecture and moving key bots. On the second-quarter earnings call, company executives emphasised that the near-term goal is to convert 500 million weekly active users into daily active users through product updates. The results showed revenue of $805 million and earnings per share of $1.25, but the share price declined.