Q&A with Reddit Chief Product Officer Pali Bhat on rolling out a dedicated video feed, Google and search, moderation, AI, NFTs, growing its 500M+ MAUs, and more
Context & Ripple Effects
Pali Bhat has been the through-line of Reddit's product strategy since he was installed as the company's first chief product officer in 2022, tasked with turning a link-and-text forum into something that grows past half a billion monthly users. This Q&A lands mid-arc: Reddit already tried original programming with its 2015 video division, and a dedicated video feed now signals a pivot from produced content to an algorithmic surface built on what users upload themselves.
The timing matters because Reddit's relationship with Google is tightening on two fronts at once — as a search distribution partner and, per the later Huffman interview confirming the Google and OpenAI partnerships, as a licensed content source. A video feed multiplies both the engagement Reddit can sell and the corpus its partners pay for.
First-order effects
- A dedicated video feed moves Reddit from community-curated browsing toward an algorithmic reel, putting it in direct competition with TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts for the same scroll time across its 500M+ MAU base.
- Volunteer moderators inherit a new content type to police; Bhat's earlier framing of AI as a moderation aid for the 50K-strong moderator corps becomes more urgent as video volume scales.
Second-order effects
- Google gains a richer, fresher Reddit index to rank in search results, deepening the dependency that later crystallized into formal licensing deals — while rival platforms face a text-plus-video archive that is uniquely attractive as AI training data.
- The NFT experimentation Bhat discusses positions Reddit to monetize identity and collectibles inside the feed, testing whether avatar commerce can offset ad dependence before any IPO pressure forces the question.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Reddit completes the same arc Instagram followed under Mosseri: a chronological, interest-graph product reorganized around recommended video, trading some community character for reach.
- Structurally, every user-generated format Reddit adds widens the gap between platforms that license their corpora to AI builders and publishers trying to wall theirs off — Reddit's scale makes it a template for the licensing side of that split.
The trend: Community platforms are rebuilding themselves as algorithmic video feeds while converting their archives into licensed fuel for search and AI — and Reddit is running both transitions simultaneously under one product chief.