How Reddit Could Level Up: A Product Roadmap for the Next Decade (part 2/2)

This article is part two of a two-part series exploring Reddit from two angles - first, as it exists today: a fascinating, imperfect ecosystem of communities and conversation. Then, in Part 2, I imagine what Reddit could become if it fully embraced its potential.

Click here for part one. 

Leadership & Product Direction

To the folks that steer Reddit, this is written for you:

You’ve built something few companies ever reach: a global platform that still feels personal.

Under your leadership, Reddit has grown from scrappy and chaotic to disciplined, publicly traded, and culturally essential.

It’s a rare balance - profitability with soul, scale with humanity.

But the next era of Reddit won’t be defined by efficiency or market share.

It will be defined by courage - the courage to swing bigger than engagement metrics or ad optimizations or your $42B market cap.

Reddit already has the ingredients to become a foundational layer of the internet’s collective intelligence - if it builds like a visionary, not an old school stodgy incumbent.

Reddit doesn’t just need growth - it needs to decide whether or not to pursue greatness. Whether to endure.

And that greatness begins with building world-class products and software for the people who make Reddit what it is: users.

Executive Leadership & Product/Tech Owners

1. Steve Huffman - CEO & Co-Founder, Reddit
2. Maria Angelidou-Smith - Chief Product Officer (CPO), Reddit
3. Chris Slowe - Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Reddit
4. Drew Vollero - Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Reddit
5. Jen Wong - Chief Operating Officer (COO), Reddit

Key Product & Strategy Leaders

1. Alex Le - EVP of Strategy & Special Projects (former VP Product), Reddit
2. Durgesh Kaushik - VP of Growth, Reddit

Board of Directors

1. Steve Huffman - Co-founder and CEO, Reddit
2. Dave Habiger - Chairman of the Board, Reddit
3. Bob Sauerberg - Vice Chairman of the Board, Reddit
4. Porter Gale
5. Michael Seibel
6. Patricia Fili-Krushel
7. Steven O. Newhouse
8. Sarah Farrell

Introduction: The Next Era of Reddit

Reddit has always been the internet’s last stronghold of authenticity - a noisy, beautiful mess of expertise, humor, and discourse.

But if the past two decades were about building communities, the next one must be about building infrastructure for human knowledge and connection.

Reddit isn’t broken. But it is under-leveraged.

It already owns one of the richest datasets in existence - millions of contextual, human-to-human explanations on everything from finance to fitness. Yet, its current trajectory feels too small for the magnitude of what it could be.

This is the moment for Reddit’s leadership - Steve Huffman, Jen Wong, and the folks listed above - to stop playing defense and hiding behind quarterly stock performance - and instead take the kind of creative swings that only a company with Reddit’s DNA could attempt.

Reddit doesn’t just reflect the internet’s culture - it is the internet’s culture. And culture deserves better products and better tools.

As a product leader who's helped build the worlds largest education marketplace, cybersecurity marketplace, consumer fintech subscription app, and home buying and financing service - this is my personal analysis and roadmap for what should come next. Consider it a wake up call for the Product Leaders, Board of Directors, and team members at Reddit: It's time to step up. And build.

I hope the following will spur ideas, reactions, and might even inspire you on what to build next. To help with this, I've even made a handful of UX prototypes.

1. Build the Community Economy

If Reddit’s subreddits are cities, then moderators are the civic engineers - keeping everything functional, clean, and mostly sane. And yet, they remain unpaid, under-equipped, and increasingly exhausted.

This is Reddit’s deepest structural flaw: the people doing the most to preserve the platform’s value are the least supported by it.

Ideas:

• Moderator Command Center: Reddit should build a first-party dashboard for moderation - visualizing spam patterns, engagement metrics, rule enforcement, and contributor trends in one place. Think of it as “Reddit Analytics for Community Health.”
• Reputation-Driven Privileges: Replace binary mod permissions with a progressive trust model. Users who consistently add value earn automated privileges (post approvals, flair edits, queue management). Governance scales, politics shrink.
• Revenue Sharing for Governance: Tie a small percentage of Reddit Premium or ad revenue to active, well-run communities. Reward moderation performance and transparency - not just raw engagement.

If Reddit’s leadership treated moderators like creators, quality would stop being an accident and start being an asset.

Reddit can’t expect world-class communities if it continues to run on volunteer labor and goodwill. Align incentives, and quality becomes self-sustaining.

2. Reinvent Reddit Premium: From Ad-Free to Power-User Mode

Right now, Reddit Premium is a quiet product. It removes ads, adds avatars, and hands out digital coins - fine for casual users, but uninspired for the people who actually power the platform.

Premium shouldn’t just make Reddit quieter - it should make Reddit smarter.

What if Premium were positioned as a Pro Layer for moderators, contributors, and serious participants - a tier that empowers creation, organization, and discovery?

Ideas:

• Community Analytics: Offer Premium users dashboards showing subreddit trends, engagement velocity, and sentiment health. Give power users real data about what’s working.
• Enhanced Discovery: Unlock smarter filtering to surface high-signal, low-noise discussions - not just what’s popular, but what’s valuable.
• Contributor Portfolio: Let users curate and showcase their most upvoted or helpful contributions - a pseudonymous portfolio that reflects impact over identity.
• Community Labs Access: Offer Premium subscribers early access to experimental features, or “Reddit Labs.” Let passionate users help shape innovation before it scales.

Don’t charge for less friction (ad-free) - charge for more power and a better experience.

Done right, Reddit Premium could evolve from a passive subscription into a creative, insight-driven toolkit for the platform’s most engaged users.

3. Redefine the Feed: Let Users Choose Their Algorithm

Reddit’s soul has always been built around intentional discovery. You subscribe to the communities you care about - that’s the product promise.

But over time, the “For You” algorithm has blurred that contract. The feed feels increasingly like a guessing game - a collision of trending memes, viral politics, and recommended chaos.

The fix isn’t to remove the algorithm; it’s to make it adjustable.

Ideas:

• Feed Dial: Let users toggle between Chronological, Community-Weighted, and Algorithmic modes. Give people the agency to design their own attention.
• Transparency Prompts: A simple note under recommended posts - “You’re seeing this because you upvoted posts from r/Tech and r/Futurology.” Transparency builds trust.
• Interest Graph Settings: Allow users to define interest clusters manually - “architecture,” “biohacking,” “emerging tech” - and let the algorithm personalize from those nodes.

Reddit doesn’t need to kill the algorithm. It just needs to invite users into it.

When users steer the algorithm, you build loyalty. When the algorithm steers the user, you build churn.

4. Lean Into Expertise Without Killing Anonymity

Reddit is full of experts who can’t prove it - doctors, engineers, scientists, analysts - people with real-world credibility, hidden behind screen names.

Instead of forcing identity verification, Reddit could verify expertise.

Ideas:

• Domain Verification: Let users verify credentials privately with Reddit, and tag them only by expertise category (e.g., “verified MD,” “licensed architect,” “CPA”). Communities like r/AskDocs and r/PersonalFinance would instantly become more trustworthy.
• Community Endorsements: Allow moderators to issue “trusted contributor” badges to users who consistently deliver quality insights. Think Stack Overflow’s reputation model, but decentralized.
• Knowledge Aggregation: Aggregate verified expert comments into searchable “Reddit Answers” pages - turning years of discussion into a living knowledge base.

Anonymity protects honesty. Verification protects truth. Reddit can have both.

5) Make the Community Economy Real

Reddit’s greatest asset is the daily labor of moderators and high-signal contributors. Treat that as a first-class product surface, not a feel-good story.

What to build:

• Governance Rev-Share: Allocate a small, transparent percentage of ad/Premium revenue to communities that meet published health benchmarks (participation balance, rule transparency, low spam, dispute resolution speed).
• Community Grants & Bounties: Quarterly micro-funds for moderator automation, onboarding guides, recurring AMA series, and high-quality knowledge posts.
• Role-Based Perks: Platform credits, Premium seats, early feature access, and API allowances for mod teams that carry heavier governance loads.

If you want better conversations, fund the people who keep them possible.

Outcome: healthier communities, professionalized moderation, and a clear loop between value created and value shared.

6) Treat AI & Data as Context-Not Just Content

Every LLM needs fresh, contextual human conversation. Reddit has it. Price it like the scarce resource it is.

What to build:

• Tiered Data Exchange: Granular API tiers priced by freshness, depth (thread vs. top comment), and sensitivity (health, legal, finance).
• Community Opt-In Controls: Subreddits choose whether their archives are licensable, require revenue-sharing, or are exempt. Build trust by letting communities set terms.
• Use-of-Proceeds Transparency: Publish how data revenue funds community tools, grants, and trust & safety.
• Context Contracts: License not just text, but the interpretation layer (e.g., signals around credibility, endorsements, expertise markers).

Don’t just license words-license meaning.

Outcome: durable, premium revenue aligned with Reddit’s core differentiator: human context.

7) Build for Knowledge, Not Virality

Reddit shouldn’t chase TikTok. It should pressure-test Google/Wikipedia by being the best place to understand anything. Even if that means crowdsourcing information from distributed sources, and then reflecting that back for easy consumption.

What to build:

• Reddit Answers (Live Knowledge Pages): For high-demand topics, continuously aggregate the most cited, expert-endorsed comments across subreddits.
• Semantic Search with Citations: Surface ranked excerpts with canonical thread links; show how the consensus evolved over time.
• Topic Health Dashboards: For big themes (nutrition, investing, DIY), show changes in community sentiment, most-referenced sources, and recurring misconceptions.
• Thread Timelines: “How this question was solved” visualizations-turn great threads into reusable knowledge objects.
• Reddit Stores: A non-negligible percentage of Reddit threads are product recommendations. Tap into this, and have a list of subreddit-recommended products that communities and moderators can earn affiliate revenue from.

Virality is a spark. Usefulness is a power plant.

Outcome: a compounding knowledge graph that makes Reddit the default starting point for real questions.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

Reddit already has the raw ingredients of the internet’s greatest knowledge platform - depth, expertise, intellectual honesty, pseudonymity, and communities built around real problems and real curiosity. What it lacks is the product architecture and features that turns those ingredients into something durable, navigable, and self-reinforcing. Reddit needs to evolve it's flywheel.

That begins with lifting up expertise in a way that strengthens trust without eroding anonymity. Reddit does not need real-name identity to surface credibility. It needs structured reputation. Verified certifications, community-earned badges, domain expertise, contextual surfacing - all of it presented cleanly, transparently, and without turning Reddit into LinkedIn 2.0. This is how Reddit amplifies its most valuable voices without intimidating the rest.

But expertise alone isn’t enough. Reddit also needs to build for knowledge, not virality. The platform should help users understand complex topics, not drown them in engagement-bait or endless comment stacks. This means elevating high-signal threads, creating structured learning modes, aggregating the best explanations across years of discussion, and treating Reddit’s archive as the knowledge graph it already is - just hidden behind pagination and noise. Virality is fleeting. Knowledge compounds.

Together, these two moves - expertise and knowledge - form the core of what Reddit must become next. Not a social feed competing for attention, but a human-powered intelligence network. A place where the best conversations are easier to find, where context replaces chaos, and where the people doing the most to elevate discourse finally have the tools and visibility they deserve.

Reddit has never been more culturally relevant, more valuable to the public, or more needed. But it is also at a crossroads. The decisions leadership makes in the next 12–24 months will determine whether Reddit evolves into the most important knowledge platform on the internet - or remains a chaotic era of potential that never became an era of excellence.

The choice is right in front of them. And the path forward is clear:
Rediscover what makes Reddit exceptional, give it the product it deserves, and build for the next generation of human knowledge.

Invest, in the users.

For inquiries or collaboration: Email adam@adamtreister.com — I personally read every message.