FIR #495: Reddit, AI, and the New Rules of Communication

Jan 5, 2026

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Reddit, the #2 social media site in the US, has surpassed TikTok to become the #4 site in the UK. It has no algorithm that forces you to see what’s most likely to keep you on the site; it just lets users upvote what they think is most interesting, valuable, or relevant. Every topic under the sun has a subreddit. Several organizations, from Starbucks to Uber, have taken advantage of it. So why is it absent from most communicators’ list of social media platforms to pay attention to? Neville and Shel look at Reddit’s growing influence in this episode.

Links from This Episode:

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 26.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 495 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson: I’m Neville Hobson and let’s start by saying we wish you a happy new 2026. We’re recording this in the first week of January, so it’s a new year. Last week the Guardian reported something that might surprise people who still think of Reddit as a noisy corner of the internet best avoided. In a deep analysis, the paper noted that Reddit has now overtaken TikTok to become the fourth most visited social media site in the UK, with three in five UK internet users encountering it regularly, according to Ofcom, the industry regulator. Among 18 to 24-year-olds—the Gen Z cohort—it’s one of the most visited organizations of any kind. And the UK is now Reddit’s second largest market globally, behind only the US.

That growth hasn’t happened because Reddit suddenly reinvented itself; it’s happened because the wider internet has changed around it. Google’s search algorithms now prioritize what it calls “helpful content,” particularly discussion forums. Reddit threads increasingly surface high in search results, and they’re also being cited heavily in AI-generated summaries. Reddit has licensing deals with both Google and OpenAI, which means its content is being used to train AI models and then redistributed back to users as part of search and discovery.

At the same time, users, particularly Gen Z, are actively seeking out human-generated content—not polished brand messaging or single definitive answers, but lived experience, contradiction, debate, and advice that feels like it comes from real people dealing with real situations like parenting, money, housing, health, and sport. Jen Wong, Reddit’s chief operating officer, described this as an “antidote to AI slop.” Reddit, she says, isn’t clean; it’s messy. You have to sift through different points of view, and increasingly, that is the point.

For communicators, this raises several important points. For a start, Reddit is no longer a niche platform you choose to engage with or ignore. It’s become part of the discovery layer of the internet. People may encounter your organization, your industry, or your issue there before they ever see your website or your carefully crafted statement. Search visibility is no longer just about content you own; it’s about conversations. Conversations at search engines and AI systems are now amplifying its scale.

Many organizations are still quietly hoping Reddit will remain hostile, chaotic, or irrelevant enough to ignore. That stance is becoming harder to justify when government departments are hosting AMAs (“Ask Me Anything”) and major public narratives are forming in plain sight. Finally, lurking is no longer neutral. Silence can allow perceptions—accurate or not—to solidify without challenge, context, or correction. So the question for communicators isn’t whether Reddit is for them, it’s whether they’re prepared for a world where human conversation, amplified by algorithms and AI, shapes reputation just as much as official messaging does. Look at the Omnicom layoffs announced not long before Christmas and the significant role Reddit played as a communication channel parallel to official company communication. We discussed this in depth in FIR 492 just a few weeks ago.

So, Shel, this feels like another signal that the ground is shifting under communicators’ feet. Where would you start unpacking what this means?

Shel Holtz: Well, if the ground is shifting, it’s because communicators weren’t standing in the right place in the first place. Reddit has been a significant and important platform for a long time. I’ve been advocating for communicators to start taking advantage of it for many years. I’m glad to see it getting this kind of attention, and there are a lot of reasons to consider using this in multiple ways—including the fact that AI is now relying on Reddit for some of the content that it’s trained on.

Let’s look at just a couple of things about Reddit. First of all, the people on Reddit are very committed to the communities that they are part of. This is not a “drop-in” community like we see on LinkedIn, nor is it tight, insular communities like you see on Facebook. These welcome new people, but they’re looking for people who are very committed to engaging, sharing, and contributing. Second, there’s no algorithm driving what rises to the top. It’s the community that upvotes the most valuable posts. That’s why you see the most valuable information at the top of any thread. It’s why in the early days, BuzzFeed relied on Reddit to determine what content it was going to publish. Reddit had the nickname “the front page of the internet,” and how you can ignore that eludes me.

If you look at what happened with Omnicom, that’s just one thing it’s useful for: social listening and insight generation. It is also issues management and crisis communication. If these large communities are talking about your industry, company, or product, and you’re not listening, you’re missing what is being discussed more broadly via “sneakernet”—people just talking to each other voice-to-voice or over instant messages where you can’t hear it. This is where you gather that intelligence to help you come up with the next product iteration or address issues important to your stakeholder base.

I use Reddit basically two ways. One, whenever I have a problem with a product, like my Nikon Z6 II camera, there is a community there more than happy to answer my question. While I’m there, I’ll scroll through and see if there’s something I can contribute, because it’s important to give as well as take. The other is monitoring construction subreddits for good intelligence that I can share up in the organization. There are so many other ways to take advantage of Reddit, and now is the time to invest.

Neville Hobson: Yeah, I’ve been on Reddit for about 10 years with an account. In those early days, it was very much a geeky place—not really mainstream. But reality, as the Guardian’s analysis outlines, is that you can’t just treat it like that anymore if you’re wearing a business hat. It is showing up in places like Google AI overviews and is heavily surfaced in those search results because of the licensing deal that allows Google to train models on Reddit data.

The UK government is active on Reddit, with departments hosting “Ask Me Anythings” to engage with people. That sort of activity is probably more appropriate for Reddit than LinkedIn, where I’ve seen government activities attract nothing but extreme, politically motivated negativity in the comments. On Reddit, you’re probably going to get a more balanced view.

The Omnicom example was really intriguing. The depth of comment on Reddit told lived experience stories that contrasted sharply with the formal communication from corporate communicators. It was a subject lesson in how not to do this from a corporate point of view. Ignoring it is not an option anymore.

Shel Holtz: You mentioned “Ask Me Anythings.” That is a great opportunity to present your CEO or subject matter experts to build reputation proactively or reactively during a crisis. Siemens did an AMA featuring their engineers and reported strong click-through rates. Novo Nordisk leaned into sensitive topics and reported an “astoundingly positive reception”. Oatly and IBM also reported strong engagement and brand lift through this format. Of course, there are disasters if executives are not well-prepared, as authenticity is highly valued.

Community engagement is another missed opportunity. Wayfair uses discovery tools on Reddit to surface conversations about their service and pops in to answer questions and address issues. You can build relationships with customers, enthusiasts, and even critics. You can also use it for your employer brand to monitor interview processes and culture signals. The CEO of Starbucks explicitly treated a Reddit hiring thread as a signal that a culture shift was taking hold.

Neville Hobson: I think one reason for past failures is that companies brought their old methods of communicating to a place where that just doesn’t work. The Guardian findings show that human experience now outranks polish. If you come to Reddit with all your corporate baggage and structured messaging, it’s not going to work. Users are actively seeking “signals of humanity,” and messiness is becoming a trust cue. It’s an “anti-automation” movement. Lurking is no longer neutral because you are being talked about whether you are present or not.

Shel Holtz: There’s an illusion of control that you get from things like press releases, but get over it—you don’t control the conversation. To be credible in these spaces, you have to stop being polished. “Press release voice” is a trigger on Reddit; plain talk is valued. Make sure you have the right subject matter expert in the right subreddits who can talk in a plain voice. Don’t just do “drive-by” communication when you need something; be a regular contributor.

Neville Hobson: So, human experience-led communications are regaining strategic value. You can’t ignore this.

Shel Holtz: LinkedIn’s value seems to be diminishing as it turns into a combination of Facebook with non-business content and AI-generated posts. If you’re looking for a community to tap into people who care about what you do, Reddit is the best place. You can even use paid amplification—Uber and Oreo have reported brand lift from boosted posts. Don’t dismiss it as hostile; develop a strategy and start doing it.

Neville Hobson: Keep an eye on the resurgence of other networks, too. The new “Digg” is coming, which was a fixture like Reddit in the early days. There is also “Tangle,” a new one from one of the Twitter founders focused on genuine conversation.

Shel Holtz: I’d keep an eye on them, but Reddit already exists with millions of users and tens of thousands of subreddits. Use it. Don’t ignore it. And that’ll be a “30” for this episode of For Immediate Release.

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