Last month, Reddit started trading on the New York Stock Exchange ($RDDT). It was the first big social-media IPO since Snap went public in 2017. Reddit closed out its first day on the market up almost 50%, but has since come crashing back down to earth at 30%. Despite the drop, Reddit is beginning to rethink how it functions now as a public company.

Last summer, Reddit locked down API access, much to the chagrin of long-time users, who protested against the change, which killed their favorite third-party apps. In February, it secured a licensing deal with Google for training AI models. And last month it launched Reddit Pro, a new analytics and insights tool for advertisers. So Reddit is open for business and exploring ways to become more than just the internet’s front page.

And it’s not just the business of the site that’s changing. We’ve discovered that the nature of what goes viral on the platform has also shifted dramatically in just the past few months — in seemingly good ways. The most popular posts on Reddit have switched from reposted content from “karma farmers,” or engagement hackers, to nearly entirely original content from less popular Reddit users. Original content from smaller communities is now outperforming recycled evergreen content by a tremendous margin across the platform. As of October, none of the top five posts of the month on r/all were original. By March of this year, four out of five of these posts were original. 

More so than other social networks like Facebook, the core Reddit experience is defined by its user-generated content. And now that Reddit Inc. is a publicly traded company, that content has to reliably and consistently be native to the platform. Has Reddit made an effort to remove content that originated elsewhere from its most visible and popular posts?

Reddit told us no. A spokesperson for the site said the changes we observed were happening organically, possibly because of a new post index system they’re testing out, which keeps feeds like r/all updated with fresher content. The increased number of upvotes, however, tell a different story. But to understand what’s changed and how, we first have to dig into how Reddit has functioned for the majority of its pre-IPO life. 

The best way to think about Reddit is as a nesting doll of smaller and smaller communities, or subreddits. You might follow a couple of them for a hobby — r/crochet has 1.1M members — or your favorite TV show — r/SVU has 62,000 — and never see the larger platform. These different communities can set their own rules, appoint moderators, and avoid dealing with everyone on the site as a single mass. Reddit’s IPO put a huge spotlight on how important these members, who are unpaid, are for maintaining the site — the company gave long-time users stock.

The content within subreddits is organized by a score redditors call “karma.” And in theory a post’s karma is the number of upvotes it receives minus the number of downvotes it receives within a certain amount of time. But in practice, attempts to artificially inflate karma are popular enough — both from people wanting attention on their posts and spammers who want to use the posts for marketing — that Reddit uses a variety of ways to control and obscure the numbers. A 2016 Verge article mentions the last publicly announced change to the karma system before the website closed its open-source repositories in 2017.

Reddit’s front page, r/all, is a list of posts with the most upvotes, or biggest karma, across every subreddit all at once. Which makes r/all a contentious feature among Reddit’s users, since a post from a smaller community reaching the top can attract a flood of new, uninformed voices to the subreddit. But r/all is also effectively the most important real estate on the site. Years ago, a link getting to the top of r/all would be referred to as the “hug of death,” because it would bring so much traffic to your website that it could crash.

Users have thoroughly figured out how to game this system over the years, though, and up until recently, r/all was almost entirely populated by big, established subreddits like r/MadeMeSmile or r/facepalm. And usually the posts coming from these subreddits are low-hanging videos or screenshots taken from other platforms weeks or even years after they were originally created. The term for this kind of engagement hack is “karma farming,” or worse, “karma whoring.” But that seems to be changing.

We’ve tracked r/all’s most popular monthly posts since early 2023, and our data suggests that in recent months some kind of change was made to combat karma farmers monopolizing the most-viewed spots on the page. 

For the entire second half of 2023, we saw just four posts that made it to the top that weren’t reposted from a different social platform (we didn’t count “meta” posts about the website). Almost 90% of these posts came from accounts that regularly repost content.

But since this January, only 27% of the top monthly posts on r/all have been from karma-farming accounts. In their place, we’re not only seeing more original posts, but ones from smaller accounts that don’t regularly reach that echelon of popularity.

Reddit, however, denies they are doing anything to make this happen. When we reached out to Reddit, they initially told us that the account we were using to collect our data may have been part of a test that had been running for several years, which shows certain users feeds with fresher content. We don’t collect data through one single account, but instead track r/all while logged out of the site and have also accessed Reddit from different Wi-Fi networks over the past year and haven’t seen any inconsistencies with karma totals or visible posts on r/all. Still, Reddit’s spokesperson said we may be part of the test group, even when logged out. 

The representative also would not say how many users are affected by this test, only that it doesn’t impact how karma works. At least, strictly speaking. The spokesperson did admit, however, that it’s possible this test could generally affect what hits the top of r/all.

“Content is loading faster so it alters what people see and when, and therefore what gets ranked higher because they're seeing more and newer content faster,” the spokesperson said.

As for why these changes are so noticeable now, there may be something else happening that, when combined with the effects of this content test index, would result in the drastic shift in what’s hitting r/all. In February, rumors started circulating among users that the admins for r/all were removing reposts directly from the feed, since they’re more likely to come from spammers or have inauthentic engagement numbers. 

“We’ve announced a number of mod tool improvements, so this is likely a result of better auto modding,” the representative said. “But it also doesn’t look like it would impact ranking.”

However accurate they are, the numbers are all we have to go on. Reddit has released next to no information about how its karma system has changed since it stopped being open-source in 2017. And its more recent moderation decisions have mostly focused on reacting to large user movements, such as in July, when it locked out moderators who were keeping subreddits inactive in protest of its API changes. 

Whatever the culprit is, it’s fairly clear why a site like Reddit would be happy that karma-farming reposts are less present on its homepage now. Original user content is so important for Reddit that the company’s S-1 advertised the IPO with several posts, comments, and images from the website. 

Ironically enough, though, it provided no credit or attribution to those users for their contributions.

Garbage Day is an award-winning newsletter that focuses on web culture and technology, covering a mix of memes, trends, and internet drama. We also run a program called Garbage Intelligence, a monthly report tracking the rise and fall of creators and accounts across every major platform on the web. And we'll be sharing some of our findings here in Sherwood. You can subscribe to Garbage Day here.