Reddit Onboarding: Matching Newcomers to Communities They Will Keep Visiting

You are a product manager at Reddit, where discussion happens inside thousands of topic communities (subreddits) that volunteers create and moderate. Someone who has just registered has not joined any of them yet. Propose how you would get newly registered users into communities that genuinely match their interests, and do it within their first few sessions. Explain which newcomers you would focus on, what is getting in their way today, what you would build first, and how you would tell whether it worked. ```hint Relevant means they come back A community a newcomer joins and then ignores does not count as a match. Decide what behavior would show the match worked, then look at each moment of the first session where a newcomer's interest can be learned or lost. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should the focus include people who first arrive on a single thread from a search engine and then register, or only people who install the app and sign up directly? - Does success mean newcomers keep reading the communities they join, or also that they comment and post in them? - Is one platform the priority, such as the mobile app over the desktop site? - Are non-English newcomers in scope, where the number of active communities in their language may be much smaller? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A chosen newcomer segment, such as search arrivals, app installs with vague interests or would-be posters, justified by how each one reaches Reddit - First-session pain points specific to Reddit: too many communities with opaque names, inactive communities, and posting rules or account-age and karma limits that can remove a first post - Ideas that span sign-up, the first home feed and the first contribution, prioritized by impact and effort with a clear first version - A success metric based on sustained engagement with joined communities rather than join counts, with guardrails for moderator load and community health - Risks such as feeds that narrow too fast, minors being steered toward adult communities, and spammers exploiting a faster path into communities ### Follow-up Questions - How would you recommend communities to a newcomer who skipped every interest question during sign-up? - If joins per new user doubled but 30-day retention stayed flat, what would you investigate first? - How would you protect moderators of large communities from a wave of first-time posters who have not read the rules?