Advertising without the doom loop: Reddit chief operating officer Jen Wong on why performance doesn’t have to mean outrage, scroll addiction and algorithmic sludge
Reddit’s contrarian wager
The internet’s most unruly forum is morphing into essential infrastructure for marketers and machines. For much of its first two decades, Reddit looked like an outlier: Anonymous, lightly monetised, and stubbornly community-first. While rivals chased influencers, identity graphs and an infinite scroll hyper-optimised for engagement, Reddit doubled down on volunteer moderators, up and down votes and the idea that no one - not even the platform - should be in charge of the conversation.
Today, improbably, it finds itself near the centre of two of the internet’s most consequential shifts: The remaking of digital advertising and the rise of generative search. Not because it pursued either with evangelical zeal, but because it refused to optimise for the metrics that defined the last era. And that places it well for the next era.
Reddit’s relationship with large language models, according to its chief operating officer Jen Wong, is less a commercial alliance than an unintended convergence of needs. Reddit did not set out to become a pillar of generative AI, she argues; it simply remained open, indexable and stubbornly human while much of the rest of the internet succumbed to optimisation, affiliate bias and synthetic noise. What LLM developers value, Wong says, is “real, authentic human perspective that is ranked” conversation layered with agreement, dissent and context. Upvotes, downvotes and long comment threads provide signals of relevance and quality that machines cannot easily manufacture for themselves.
Crucially, Wong resists the idea that Reddit can, or should, be “optimised” for LLM outcomes. The company does not know, she says, what models will surface, suppress or recombine, and neither, she adds pointedly, do the model owners themselves. Reddit’s value to AI systems lies precisely in its lack of instrumental intent: It was not built to influence search rankings or machine outputs, and cannot reliably be gamed in that way. This indifference has become an unlikely asset. As the web fills with content designed to please algorithms, Reddit’s unpolished debates, governed by collective judgement rather than optimisation tricks, have become a rare source of grounded human signal. For marketers and model-builders alike, that makes the platform less a channel to be manipulated than a piece of underlying infrastructure. It's useful because it refuses to try too hard.
In an interview with Wong, the company’s strategy emerges not as a bid to out-social social media, but as a wager that human conversation, governed by collective judgment, will outlast both influencer economics and algorithmic sludge. The bet is risky, but it is also increasingly legible to marketers, and to machines.
Advertising without the doom loop
Much of the modern internet is trapped in a feedback loop of its own making. Platforms optimise for engagement; engagement rewards provocation; provocation corrodes trust. Performance advertising is often blamed for this spiral, accused of turning every digital surface into a race for attention at any cost.
Wong's counter-argument is blunt: The problem is not performance marketing, but what platforms choose to optimise for.
“I don’t think performance-based advertising is the root of that issue,” Wong tells Mi3. “What retains [users] on Reddit is when people have a quote, good visit, and they go deep … We don’t tune for more scrolls.”
That distinction - between depth and scrolls - does much of the philosophical work in Reddit’s self-portrait. Where other platforms treat time-onsite as a function of velocity, Reddit treats it as a function of immersion. Users are not encouraged to skim endlessly; they are nudged to click into threads, read arguments and counter-arguments, and linger.
This is not accidental. Reddit’s ranking system ensures that content must earn its place before it can even travel. Posts start at zero. Each user gets one vote. Downvotes count as much as upvotes. “If something is controversial, a 100 ups and a 100 downs and you’re at zero. You’re going nowhere,” Wong explains. The effect is to dampen outrage rather than amplify it.
That same logic shapes Reddit’s advertising model. Ads are sold via auction, but price alone does not determine placement. “It’s a combination of ad quality, ad relevance for the user, and then the propensity to have an outcome,” Wong says. Relevance and predicted results matter as much as bids.
Crucially, ads do not live only in the feed. They also appear inside conversations, when users are already immersed in topics that signal intent: Buying a car, choosing accounting software, managing money, dealing with health concerns. “That’s a moment when something really relevant can be put in front of me that doesn’t exist in other platforms,” she says.
This is why Reddit’s commercial logic looks less like social media and more like search. Intent is declared, not inferred, context matters more than identity, and success is measured in outcomes instead of applause reverberating inside an echo chamber.
Wong is explicit about the distinction. “Most companies … make all their ads show in the feed. So you want a lot of deep scrolling,” she says. “We do have ads in the feed. That’s fine. But we also have ads when you click into the conversation, which is highly contextual.”
The difference may be subtle but it's important. Search advertising has long been tolerated, and indeed even welcomed, because it meets users at moments of declared need. Social advertising, by contrast, has been accused of manufacturing need by manipulating emotion. Reddit’s bet apparently, is that conversation-level context can restore something closer to the former.
Whether this fully insulates Reddit from the pathologies of optimisation remains to be seen. Any system that predicts outcomes can, in theory, be gamed. But Reddit’s insistence that performance need not mean provocation is a pointed rebuke to an industry that long treated the two as inseparable.
A platform that machines value because humans do
Reddit’s newfound relevance to advertisers cannot be separated from its rising importance to large language models. For years, Reddit was simply open, indexable, and useful. Then search engines began surfacing it more frequently. Now generative systems ingest it as training data and retrieval material.
Wong is careful not to claim intentional design. “Nothing about what we do is to gain search rank or to gain LLM rank,” she says. “No one knows what comes out of LLMs, including the model owners.”
But she is clear about why Reddit matters. “What they value is real, authentic human perspective that is ranked,” she says. “There is no artificial intelligence without human intelligence.”
Reddit’s architecture - its layered comments, upvotes and downvotes, moderation rules enforced by volunteers creates signals of relevance and quality that synthetic content lacks.
For advertisers, this creates second-order effects. Conversations on Reddit influence search visibility, brand perception and downstream behaviour. But these effects cannot be directly controlled. Influence emerges, or it does not.
That lack of control is precisely what gives Reddit its credibility and why attempts to “optimise for Reddit” in the old SEO sense tend to fail.
How brands should behave
If Reddit’s advertising model is contrarian, its expectations of brands are downright austere. The first rule is to listen.
“You always start with insight. You always start with listening to Reddit,” Wong says. She urges brands to first understand what Reddit's communities already say about their category, their competitors, and their product, before attempting to speak at all.
In this sense, Reddit positions itself as a continuous, unfiltered research layer: an always-on focus group conducted in public.
Only then should brands engage, and when they do, they should enter transparently, she says. “I always say you start with the marketing platform,” Wong tells Mi3. “It’s how Redditors expect brands to set the table for the conversations they want to have.”
This reflects Reddit’s history. Unlike Facebook, for instance, it did not grow up on organic brand profiles. Paid placements are clearly marked; attempts to “blend in” are treated with suspicion. Users, accustomed to spotting bad-faith arguments, tend to punish deception swiftly.
From there, Wong sketches a three-stage maturity model. Most brands, she suggests, should remain at the early stages. “Most companies right now … are more like level one, level two,” she says.
Stage one is performance-led advertising: Using Reddit’s ad tools to deliver outcomes at scale. Stage two involves selective two-way conversation, discussing product features, category issues or values, informed by insights from the community.
Stage three is deeper still: Embedded participation in communities, customer service, or sustained dialogue. “That requires more resources,” Wong concedes. It also requires trust, and a willingness to be contradicted in public.
“Users will share their honest opinions,” she says. “That’s what makes Reddit valuable. It’s authentic human opinion that’s not controlled by anybody.”
It's also a brand safety issue, since Reddit users are just as susceptible to misinformation and hate speech as the next person. When Mi3 pushed back on the idea that truth and trustworthiness are not inseparable bedfellows online, Wong demurs.
"We think of Reddit as a great place for opinion, and especially on things where there's maybe no right answer ... Like, what's the best walking shoe. I think of Reddit as a great place for perspectives."
Transparency, privacy and restraint
Reddit’s expectations of brands mirror its expectations of itself. Privacy, Wong insists, is not a feature but a right. The platform does not collect names or ages; users may authenticate via email or third-party services, but Reddit retains only an internal identifier.
“We have very strict privacy rules,” she says. “We believe privacy is a right. It’s really important to us. It’s always been at the foundation of Reddit... We built it into the advertising.”
That stance differentiates Reddit from platforms accused of trading in sensitive personal data - a topic brought recently into sharp relief after the new owners of US TikTok updated their policy in a way that enables them to collect and sell highly sensitive information such as ethnicity, gender orientation, and religious beliefs to customers include the US government.
It also shapes its advertising philosophy. Without rich identity graphs, relevance must come from context and declared interest, not surveillance.
This, too, is a constraint masquerading as a virtue. It limits deterministic targeting and forces advertisers to think harder about message and placement. But it also aligns Reddit with a regulatory environment increasingly hostile to opaque data practices.
A narrow, deliberate path
Reddit’s strategy is not expansionist in the way Silicon Valley has come to expect. Wong is explicit that not every brand needs to go further, faster. “Most of the marketing industry is transacted on great outcomes that deliver business outcomes day in, day out,” she says. Her argument is that Reddit can do that, without demanding cultural colonisation.
The platform’s ambition is quieter. To grow reach and to integrate gradually with the broader ad-tech ecosystem. To remain useful to its users first and advertisers second, and, increasingly, to machines.
This restraint may yet prove costly. The temptation to loosen rules, chase growth and smooth friction will grow as Reddit’s influence expands. But for now, its refusal to optimise for scrolls, outrage or artificial intimacy sets it apart.
Reddit did not set out to become essential. It simply refused to become something else.
