Reddit now lets users hide posting and commenting history on their profiles via a “Content and Activity” setting, as part of a new “Curate your profile” section
Reddit on Tuesday announced a new feature that will offer its users more privacy when it comes to what's shared on their user profiles.
Context & Ripple Effects
Reddit’s profile layer was introduced as a way to let people publish to and follow individual pages. This update adds a user-controlled boundary to that earlier profile-centric publishing model, rather than removing participation from the platform.
It also creates a more privacy-protective counterpoint to Reddit’s earlier reduction in activity-based ad-personalization opt-outs. The distinction matters: public profile visibility and platform-level use of activity are separate controls.
First-order effects
- Users can prevent visitors to their profiles from viewing their posting and commenting history, while retaining control over how their profile is presented.
- Reddit makes public-profile curation a distinct product setting, reducing the automatic link between an account’s profile and its visible participation record.
Second-order effects
- Profiles may become less useful as a one-stop public record for evaluating a user’s past contributions, shifting more context gathering back to individual communities and threads.
- The move puts Reddit closer to a broader social-platform pattern of letting users limit public signals; X had also proposed hiding users’ Likes from other users.
Third-order effects
- If platforms continue separating public identity from activity trails, profile pages could evolve from comprehensive histories into selectively curated identity surfaces.
- The longer-running tension is between granular user access controls and platforms’ incentives to retain activity data for internal personalization and monetization.
The trend: Social platforms are moving toward more modular privacy controls that let users manage the public visibility of their activity without necessarily changing how platforms use that activity internally.