Overview
- Reddit CEO Steve Huffman announced on Thursday's second-quarter earnings call that the company is building a combined video and background-audio experience to surface viral Reddit posts as watchable or listenable content.
- The planned feature would let users watch short vertical videos of threads or listen to narrated posts in the background, though Reddit has not detailed how narration, moderation, monetization, or app integration will work.
- The move targets a large off-platform trend in which creators turn Reddit threads into short clips: reporters cite roughly 19.6 million TikTok posts tagged #reddit and about 9.9 million tagged #redditstories.
- Reddit points to early internal video signals as part of the roadmap, noting that video comments launched in June now account for more than 10% of its video posts.
- The plan follows a wider shift by social and streaming platforms toward short vertical video, and Reddit's success will hinge on solving past video problems—an unreliable player and a 2022 TikTok-style feed test that failed—and on how it incentivizes creators and enforces moderation.