Reddit takes Spotify's cue, offers personalized year-in-reviews

Reddit announced its Recap feature earlier today, making it the latest social media platform to inform users of just how much time they’ve wasted on their internet hellhole of choice over the course of 2021. While the company focused on the big picture annual numbers in past years, this time around it seems to have realized people generally respond much more positively to your product when you proceed to make it all about them.

Beginning tomorrow, redditors will be able to learn things like how much time you spent on the site, the kinds of content and subreddits you engaged with the most, and all of the communities you’ve joined or visited throughout 2021. As a whole, it looks like the pandemic sent a lot more visitors Reddit’s way: 366 million posts were created within over 100,000 communities over the past year, up nearly one-fifth from 2020. As of November 9, over 2.3 billion comments were published marking a roughly 12-percent increase. Upvotes, on the other hand, only jumped around 1-percent in the past 12 months... but that’s still 46 billion individual votes, by the way.

And first place goes to... It probably will surprise very few of you to learn that cryptocurrency-related subreddits were far and away the most popular communities of the past year. Between r/WallStreetBets’ viral rise to power, meme economics, and the Technoking’s frequent Dogecoin inanities, a bunch more people have been turned on to the digital banking system.

Take a page from Spotify — If all this bears a striking similarity to Spotify’s annual Year in Review recaps... well, you’re not wrong there. Users are generally interested in the big picture numbers from these kinds of social media and entertainment companies, but let’s not kid ourselves here: people want to read about themselves, not everyone else. Showcasing stats is an easy way for companies to engage with consumers while queuing them up for a new year of loyalty.

And sure, seeing what our favorite posts or most played songs of the year are is a fun bit of data to know... just remember that these companies also know these datapoints, and then some.