Why Reddit wants to turn text posts into podcasts and short videos

Huffman was referring to how social platforms such as Meta’s Reels, YouTube, and TikTok are increasingly being used to narrate a Reddit post through a text-to-speech over background gameplay or cooking clips. In a way, Reddit is trying to cash in on that audience and bring watch or listen time directly back into its own platform.

Google’s push toward AI-powered summaries is reducing referral traffic to sites like Reddit.

“We see folks doing this off platform. There’s an emerging content type elsewhere in the internet of basically a podcast where people read Reddit content. And so I think this version of like listened to- or spoken- Reddit can be really engaging as well,” Huffman explained on the call.

It is true that for many users, going through long-form threads and understanding their depth can be difficult on the go. Audio or video could help simplify these discussions while users are commuting, working out, or multitasking.

That being said, text-only posts aren’t going away and will continue to exist. This means users can still view the original thread, the discussions that followed, and the comments.

The difference is that Reddit now suggests users can listen to Reddit audio when they are too busy with work or, at times, when they want to dive deeper into written content through a combination of audio and video. Reddit describes this experience as a new way to experience the platform and the conversations that matter.

Not just Reddit, but every major social platform is experimenting with new formats, leaning heavily on short-form video as a means to discover and consume content. Meta’s Instagram, Google’s YouTube, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn already allow users to create and publish short-form, bite-sized videos on their platforms. Short-form videos usually last around a minute or less, and their audience is different from that of users who prefer to watch long-form videos.

Reddit is, for many people, where they get their information including news these days. (Image credit: Reddit)

Reddit’s approach, however, is different from others: instead of asking users to create new videos, it is repurposing the vast amount of text and discussions already created by its communities into new formats.

The changes can also be felt in how mainstream media operates globally, as publishers are remodelling content in response to declining traffic and finding new ways to develop growth strategies for the Google AI Search era.

Reddit has more than 500 million weekly active users and 130 million+ daily active users globally. Reddit is organised into user-created communities called subreddits, where content is ranked by user votes rather than chronological order. Reddit also employs administrators, or admins, who can overrule moderators and remove subreddits. Those who are active on the platform say that the Reddit experience is refreshing because the content is personal, and real users engage in genuine discussions. This can feel different amid the rise of AI-generated “slop” taking over parts of the internet.

Reddit has inked deals with OpenAI and Google, allowing both companies to use the platform’s vast catalogue of content to help train and improve their AI models. However, as Google gradually moves away from its traditional search model and pushes AI-powered summaries, Reddit is not getting the same level of referral traffic it used to receive. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Reddit was considering cutting ties with Google over access to its data, amid concerns that the search giant was contributing to declining search referral traffic for publishers such as USA Today and Politico.

For now, Reddit’s experiment will focus only on select English-language posts and will be available through the Reddit apps for iOS and Android. It remains to be seen whether Reddit will succeed in transforming its enormous archive of community-generated conversations into new formats.

The platform has been working on several ideas to keep user engagement high. It recently launched support for video in comments, which it says now accounts for more than 10 per cent of video posts on its platform.