Reddit Contribution

Everything on Reddit starts with someone posting or commenting. No posts, nothing to read. Most people only read.

Commenting with a GIF existed, but only behind Powerups, a paid community perk. Posting was a cluttered flow of screens that asked you to pick a post type before you had anything to say.

And nobody had studied how a reader becomes a contributor. Without that, every fix was a guess.

Research first

I asked for the foundational research first. It came back as what contributors need: belonging, education, rewards and less fear. We turned those into principles the whole team designed against.

• Give tools, not rules.
• Accessible and easy to understand.
• Eliminate questions for first-time contributors.
• Reward every action.

The pitch

I took the research, the Hooked model and the funnel data to the VP of Product and argued a paid feature would earn more as a free one. People wanted GIFs; the paywall was hiding them.

The team

I led 5 designers inside a 33-person scope of product, engineering, research and data science.

Testing

We documented the old flow, ran a heuristic review and mapped the contribution journey against the research. Then we tested the current posting flow against two built from exposed blocks.

The current flow tested as "over complicated" and "a hassle". The exposed blocks tested as "simple" and "quick and easy". People also said media would keep them on a post longer.

The slow part

Each of those tests meant building the prototypes by hand first, and that was the slow part. The research was quick. Making something real enough to test took weeks.

The numbers are the team's experiment results across the platform, not mine alone. A designer doesn't move engagement by themselves.

We cut a lot to ship this, and some of what we cut is still waiting. Not every concept tested well. Some of the blocks we liked didn't survive the usability study.

This is where I learned that prototyping, not design, was what slowed a team down. Reddit Proto is what I built next.

Media comments drew about 60% more engagement than text. 6,253 subreddits turned it on and 2,728 used it daily. 4.7% of commenters were posting images.

The posting work shipped too. Intuitive Post Type lifted link posts by +3.4% and image posts by +1.9% on Android. The simpler subreddit header lifted subscribes by +2.2% on iOS.

GIFs went free on July 13, 2022, the day Powerups, the paid perk, shut down. Moderators kept control: opt-in for existing communities, on by default for new ones. The same model later brought images into comments, in December 2022, and video replies, in June 2026.

More than 10 publications covered the launch, from Engadget and Gizmodo to 9to5Mac.