Reddit is revamping its metrics to emphasize content creation (with a hat tip for lurkers)

In the age of AI slop, Reddit has become a busy hub for people who prioritize human-to-human effort and interaction. It’s one of the few places anymore where you can still find discussions among and assistance from real people instead of slopped-out, generated bot replies. It calls itself “the most human place on the internet”–and, when human-impersonating AI bots were found on r/changemyview back in May, it promised to “keep Reddit human” by ousting nonhuman accounts.

That doesn’t mean it’s a shining star. It’s said modern “AI”–actually large language models, as Markiplier recently emphasized to us–is “incredibly useful for things like summarization, safety, translation, and moderation.” It’s also selling data to OpenAI (whose CEO Sam Altman is one of Reddit’s biggest shareholders) for use in model training.

And now, amidst setting a new record-high stock price of $253.57/share, it’s tweaking how some of that data is displayed to the public.

“Starting today, we’ll replace the ‘Member Count’ metric on each subreddit’s page with two new signals: Visitors and Contributions,” the platform said in an official blog post. “Unlike subscribers, which were often a measure of a subreddit’s age and not current activity, these new metrics show how many people are actively participating in communities and how much content is being created.”

The new Visitors metric shows how many unique visitors were on that particular subreddit in the past seven days, “based on a rolling 28-day average,” it explained.

As for Contributions, that figure shows the number of non-removed posts and comments made in a subreddit over the past seven days.

Reddit said that, on top of the previous Member Count metric being better at showing a community’s age instead of its current activity, plenty of subreddits are visited by lurkers (aka people who don’t post or comment, but do

read, often prolifically), as well as non-members who post and/or comment.

Basically, the previous Member Count was including potentially inactive members, while not accounting for readers and non-members contributing currently and meaningfully.

“With this update, Reddit becomes one of the first major platforms to publicly display active participation, focusing on meaningful, real-time engagement rather than subscriber numbers,” Reddit said. “By emphasizing active participation over passive membership, we’re continuing to highlight what makes Reddit unique: real people engaging in real conversations.”

This change makes sense, especially considering Reddit’s real-people-centric branding and its push to become a more content creator-forward platform. As it said, this change will count not just a subreddit’s number of active participants, but also the amount of content being made on a rolling basis. More performance metrics, not to mention more accurate performance metrics, might draw more creators–and more advertisers.

We’re curious what Reddit will do with this data moving forward, but for right now, it’s in a pretty good spot. Its all-time stock high was in large part driven by stellar Q2 earnings showing 78% year-over-year growth, with revenue 17% above analyst predictions. Its net income was $89 million–a major improvement over Q2 2024, which posted a net loss of $10 million thanks to IPO costs.

When Reddit launched its IPO, shares were priced at $34. Someone who bought in then is now sitting on a return of over 320%.