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- Reddit is retiring r/popular as its default feed.
- CEO Steve Huffman said the feed "gives the false impression of a singular Reddit culture."
- He said removing the feature would promote a more personalized and relevant user experience.
Reddit is getting rid of one of its oldest fixtures.
The platform's CEO, Steve Huffman, said in a post that Reddit would be removing its r/popular feed from the homepage for new users to promote a more personalized and relevant user experience.
The popular feed, located on the left sidebar of the website, displays the most liked recent posts across the platform.
"In theory, it's what's most popular on Reddit, but it's actually what is liked by the most active users on Reddit—which is not the same thing," he said. "Having it as a default feed gives the false impression of a singular Reddit culture, one that is neither representative of Reddit nor appealing to new users (or anyone at all, IMO)."
He summed up his disdain for the feature by saying, "r/popular sucks, and we're moving away from it, and towards better, more relevant and personalized feeds."
Huffman, who has been the platform's CEO since 2015, said Reddit would stop showing the popular feed in the sidebar unless users read it regularly.
He said his favorite part of Reddit was that every community on the platform had its own unique culture, rules, and sense of humor.
"And if your perspective isn't represented, you can create the community you want to see," he said. "The freedom to build your own corner of the internet is what makes Reddit, Reddit."
The platform gets 116 million visitors daily, he said. Reddit's stock price has risen about 44% in the past year.
In the post, he announced a few other changes, like limiting the number of high-traffic communities a single person can moderate, and changing the way it shows community sizes.
"These changes are all part of the same goal: making Reddit more conducive to how people actually use it today," he said.
This is not Reddit's first effort to nudge its users into smaller community groups, as it recalibrates its platform alongside competitors like Quora, and beyond that, the likes of Meta.
In October, Reddit removed its public chat feature and urged users to chat on private group chats as a way to "connect with communities in smaller, focused spaces."
