Concerns have been raised in particular about dangerous medical misinformation on the platform. Reddit has changed its site-wide editorial policies several times, sometimes in reaction to controversies. In December of that year, Mister Splashy Pants was announced as the winner of the competition. In the aftermath, the target of this vote brigading appeared to take it in good humor. Though all of these examples are in some form, against the rules of Reddit’s content policy, at least in the case of brigading, they are not always malicious in intent. Several celebrities have participated in the program, including Bill Gates, Alyssa Milano, and Snoop Dogg.
YouTube’s $3M fund for creative professionals in L.A.
The next year, the site celebrated its “100th anniversary” with a range of sepia-toned silent, early 1900s-style films, including a parody of Keyboard Cat. In 2010, YouTube temporarily released a “TEXTp” mode which rendered video imagery into ASCII art letters “in order to reduce bandwidth costs by $1 per second.” The next year, when clicking on a video on the main page, the whole page turned upside down, which YouTube claimed was a “new layout”. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov labeled the court decision as “symbolic” and warned Google that it “should not be restricting the actions of our broadcasters on its platform.”
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Following criticisms of its implementation of those systems, YouTube started treating all videos designated as “made for kids” as liable under COPPA on January 6, 2020. By February 2017, one billion hours of YouTube videos were being watched every day, and 400 hours worth of videos were uploaded every minute. YouTube officially launched the “polymer” redesign of its user interfaces based on Material Design language as its default, as well as a redesigned logo that is built around the service’s play button emblem in August 2017. Hurley announced that he would be stepping down as chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role and that Salar Kamangar would take over as head of the company in October 2010. That year, the company again changed its interface and at the same time, introduced a new logo with a darker shade of red. In 2011, more than three billion videos were being watched each day with 48 hours of new videos uploaded every minute.
Google first published exact revenue numbers for YouTube in February 2020 as part of Alphabet’s 2019 financial report. In June 2008, a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at $200 million, noting progress in advertising sales. Prior to 2020, Google did not provide detailed figures for YouTube’s running costs, and YouTube’s revenues in 2007 were noted as “not material” in a regulatory filing. The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra selected their membership based on individual video performances.
- As of September 2025, all versions of the iReddit and Alien Blue apps still work on older versions of iOS; they were not affected by the API shutdown due to both of them being official Reddit apps.
- YouTube officially launched the “polymer” redesign of its user interfaces based on Material Design language as its default, as well as a redesigned logo that is built around the service’s play button emblem in August 2017.
- In 2025, researchers from the University of Zurich conducted a experiment on the debate subreddit r/changemyview.
- As part of its company culture, Reddit operates on a no-negotiation policy for employee salaries.
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In October 2014, Reddit acquired one of them, Alien Blue, which became the official iOS Reddit app. For several years, most Redditors relied on third-party apps to access Reddit on mobile devices. This app was sparsely updated, and was superseded by a new mobile webite in 2010. Reddit’s search function has had many iterations; the one on the new site currently uses Lucidworks Fusion, while the search on old reddit uses Reddit’s own in-house search The partnership also lets Reddit get access to Google’s “Vertex AI” service which would help improve search results on Reddit. Reddit acquired MeaningCloud, a natural language processing company in June 2022.
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- It has also been used for self-organizing sociopolitical activism such as protests, communication with politicians and active communities.
- In January 2025, over 100 Reddit communities banned users from posting links from the X social media site after Elon Musk, its CEO, made an arm gesture at a speech which critics claimed was a Nazi salute.
- President Obama held a meeting at the White House with leading YouTube content creators not only to promote awareness of Obamacare but more generally to develop ways for government to better connect with the “YouTube Generation”.
In May 2024, YouTube introduced Playables, a set of around 75 free-to-play games that can be played on the platform. Starting with the Oculus Quest, the app was updated for compatibility with mixed-reality passthrough modes on VR headsets. In November 2016, YouTube released YouTube VR, a dedicated version with an interface for VR devices, for Google’s Daydream mobile VR platform on Android.
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Flair are tags that appear after a username—for example, a label that allows a person in a fitness forum to indicate that they are a weightlifter, yogi, cyclist, runner, etc. Huffman created an algorithm that allowed the most popular content to rise to the top according to both time and popularity. The idea was for users to submit the best articles from major news outlets, journals, and other sites so they would not have to visit each individual publication.
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Comments were added in 2005 and interest-based groups (called ‘subreddits’) were introduced in 2008. The app allowed users to see active Ask Me Anythings, receive notifications, ask questions and vote. It was announced that Reddit and OpenAI had reached a deal that will allow OpenAI access to the Reddit API to train its models, while Reddit will receive certain AI tools for moderators and users. The avatars were created by independent artists who post work on other subreddits, and who receive a portion of the profits. On July 7, 2022, Reddit announced “blockchain-backed Collectible Avatars”, customizable avatars which are available on the subreddit r/CollectibleAvatars for purchase separate from Reddit Premium.
Most of these views came from a relatively small number of videos; according to a software engineer at that time, 30% of videos accounted for 99% of views on the site. By 2010, the company had reached a market share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos, according to comScore. They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward. Video categories on YouTube include music videos, video clips, news, short and feature films, songs, documentaries, movie trailers, teasers, TV spots, live streams, vlogs, and more. YouTube incorporated the Google AdSense program, generating more revenue for both YouTube and approved content creators.
Its demographics allows for wide-ranging subject areas, as well as the ability for smaller subreddits to serve more niche purposes. The company launched sponsored content and a self-serve ads platform that year. On July 1, 2020, RPAN Studio was released, an application that allows users to broadcast live from desktop computers. During the off-air hours, 24/7 streaming was possible to the dedicated subreddits, but with limited slots and capabilities. Reddit’s logo consists of a time-traveling alien named Snoo and the company name stylized as “reddit”.
After the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, Reddit faced criticism after users wrongly identified a number of people as suspects in the subreddit r/FindBostonBombers. In general, the website grants subreddit moderators discretion in deciding what content is and is not allowed on their subreddits, so long as site-wide rules are not being violated. Millions of users worked together in communities to place pixels one at a time to create a larger canvas. In 2017, users upvoted “Battle for the Net” posts enough times that they filled up the entire front page. In February 2014, Reddit announced it would donate 10% of its annual ad revenue to non-profits voted upon by its users.
Since May 2014, Reddit has been blocked in Indonesia by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology for hosting content containing nudity. On Reddit, Huffman urged redditors to express support for net neutrality and contact their elected representatives in Washington, D.C. Huffman said that the repeal of net neutrality rules stifles competition. In 2017, Huffman told The New York Times that without net neutrality protections, “you give internet service providers the ability to choose winners and losers”.
A similar donation drive in 2011 saw the atheism subreddit raise over $200,000 for charity. Politically, 43% of Reddit users surveyed by Pew Research Center in 2016 identified as liberal, with 38% identifying as moderate and 19% as conservative. Users tend to be significantly younger than average with less than 1% of users being 65 or over. In 2016, the Pew Research Center published research showing that 4% of U.S. adults use Reddit, of which 67% are men, while 78% of users get news from Reddit. Statistics from Google Ad Planner suggest that 74% of Reddit users are male. With regards to education, high school dropouts were over-represented among Reddit users.
The site’s content is divided into categories or communities known on-site as “subreddits”, of which there are more than 138,000 active communities. Reddit also instituted several technological improvements, such as a new tool that allows users to hide posts, comments, and private messages from selected redditors in an attempt to curb online harassment, and new content guidelines. The majority of YouTube’s advertising revenue goes to the publishers and video producers who hold the rights to their videos; the company retains 45% of the ad revenue.
A key feature to Reddit is that users can cast positive or negative votes, called upvotes and downvotes respectively, for each post and comment on the site. Huffman said new users were turned off from Reddit because it had looked like a “dystopian Craigslist”. Also during this time, Reddit began accepting the digital currency Bitcoin for its Reddit Gold subscription service through a partnership with bitcoin payment processor Coinbase in February 2013. Ohanian credited Wong with the company’s newfound success as its user base grew from 35 million to 174 million. Their initial idea, My Mobile Menu, was unsuccessful, and was intended to allow users to order food by SMS text messaging.
Subreddits all begin with “r/”—the URL structure that Reddit uses to denote them. At first Reddit was meant to be a “front page of the Internet”—and indeed this was its motto for some time. This was before the mass proliferation of smartphones and mobile applications, and Graham was skeptical about the idea. During their senior year of college, they came up with an idea for a service that would allow customers to place orders at restaurants via text message before arriving. Reddit was launched in 2005 by American entrepreneurs Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian; it became a publicly held company in 2024. The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports.
In 2014, YouTube announced a subscription service known as “Music Key”, which bundled ad-free streaming of music content on YouTube with the existing Google Play Music service. That year, the company simplified its interface to increase the time users would spend on the site. The site grew rapidly; in July 2006, the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.
The campaign was mentioned on-air several times, and when the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was held in Washington, D.C., on October 30, 2010, thousands of redditors made the journey. The site and its users protested the Federal Communications Commission as it prepared to scrap net neutrality rules. Reddit users have been engaged in the defense of Internet privacy, net neutrality and Internet anonymity.
Made for you, by you: Introducing YouTube Recap
In April 2010, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” became the most-viewed video, becoming the first video to reach 200 million views on May 9, 2010. On October 9, 2006, Google announced that they had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. The choice of the name youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, utube.com. Despite eventually being taken down, these duplicate uploads of the skit helped popularize YouTube’s reach and led to the upload of more third-party content. Besides helping to bolster ratings and long-term viewership for Saturday Night Live, “Lazy Sunday”‘s status as an early viral video helped establish YouTube as an important website. YouTube was not the first video-sharing site on the Internet; Vimeo was founded in November 2004, though that site remained a side project of its developers from CollegeHumor.
In December 2024, YouTube added the functionality of automatic language dubbing, which uses AI to produce translations of videos into different languages. YouTube VR allows for access to all YouTube-hosted videos, but particularly supports headset access for 360° and 180°-degree video (both in 2D and stereoscopic coondog 3D). In September 2016, YouTube Go was announced, as an Android app created for making YouTube easier to access on mobile devices in emerging markets. On February 28, 2017, in a press announcement held at YouTube Space Los Angeles, YouTube announced YouTube TV, an over-the-top MVPD-style subscription service that would be available for United States customers at a price of US$65 per month.
Discovery (including among others Bravo, USA Network, Syfy, Disney Channel, CNN, Cartoon Network, E!, Fox Sports 1, Freeform, FX and ESPN). Other functions of Google Play Movies & TV were integrated into the Google TV service. First released on February 15, 2015, as an Android and iOS mobile app, the app has since been released for LG, Samsung, and Sony smart TVs, as well as for Android TV. It offers advertising-free streaming, access to original programming, and background and offline video playback on mobile devices. YouTube Premium (formerly Music Key and YouTube Red) is YouTube’s premium subscription service. In 2012, clicking on the image of a DVD next to the site logo led to a video about a purported option to order every YouTube video for home delivery on DVD.