Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says there are two kinds of people who come to the social media platform: Scrollers and seekers.
Scrollers are the ones who come to Reddit’s core product, which is community conversation and engaging about topics they’re passionate about, from r/sourdough to r/popculturechat. Then there are the Seekers; the people who might type their specific query into Google Search and tack “Reddit” on the end so they can find real advice and opinions from real people.
Reddit Answers, the company’s AI-powered chatbot that surfaces verbatim answers and summaries from existing Reddit posts, is for the Seekers. And early results suggest it is already gaining traction.
“Up until very recently, we haven’t built a product for them,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said Thursday on the company’s first-quarter earnings call. “Those users are not coming to Reddit for a community in that moment. They’re coming for an answer. And I think we can [acknowledge] the use case that the user’s bringing us and be more effective at solving it.”
Reddit announced during the call that its Answers product already has 1 million weekly active users since it launched in beta in December. Last month, Reddit expanded Answers beyond the U.S. and into Australia, the U.K., Canada, and India.
The feature, which is still in beta, currently lives in the navigation bar of the app as its own separate experience. Going into 2025, Reddit plans to integrate Answers more deeply into the platform in a few different ways.
Huffman said the most obvious way to do this would be to integrate Answers into the primary search box, which could allow users to type in a full query rather than just a few keywords.
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The executive also said the company is exploring ways to integrate …