On my YouTube Shorts, a certain type of video has become a frequent sight. By taking a text-to-speech recitation of a popular Reddit thread and pairing it with irrelevant footage from a video game or oddly satisfying compilation, creators haul in millions of views.
The popularity of that format has raised a burning question at Reddit HQ: Can the #redditstories genre move from Shorts and TikTok to Reddit itself? With an upcoming experiment, the social platform will test the validity of that idea.
During Reddit’s Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Steve Huffman revealed that his product team is hard at work on a “video Reddit” experience that would let users listen to posts and comments as a form of background engagement. Huffman said that a test version of that player will be ready for a rollout later this year.
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If Reddit can turn thread recitations into a viable format, it can absorb a lot of traffic that currently flows through other platforms. TechCrunch noted that there are nearly ten million TikTok posts that have been tagged with the phrase #redditstories.
Huffman is well aware of that genre, which has made it to popular creator-led channels like Smosh Pit and kallmekris. “There is an emerging content type elsewhere on the internet of, basically, podcasts where people read Reddit content,” he said during the earnings call. “I think this version of, like, listened-to or spoken Reddit can be really engaging, as well. So that would be almost a different format entirely.”
The history of video on Reddit has been a long-running game of catch-up. In the early 2010s, back when Reddit was still known as “the front page of the internet,” YouTube embeds were the dominant form of media on subreddits like /r/videos. The 2017 launch of an in-house player gave Reddit native video traffic. Within a year, that product was delivering 1.4 billion monthly views.
More recently, Reddit has adopted formats that first rose up elsewhere. A TikTok-esque Watch tab arrived as a dedicated hub for video content, and Reddit further embraced the short-form revolution by letting its users turn their comments into videos.
The upcoming product will let Reddit keep moving down the path to complete TikTok-ification. And as for the platform’s quarterly results? Its revenue rose 61% year-over-year to reach $805 million, exceeding Wall Street expectations. And those video comments are already proving popular, as they now account for more than 10% of Reddit’s video posts.
