Reddit Obtains Machine Learning Platform Spell to Optimize Contextual Matching Algorithms

With obtaining the machine learning platform Spell, Reddit plans to incorporate it into its platform to strengthen its algorithm matching and spam detection. Spell will boost the platform's capability in a lot of different ways.

Spell allows teams to execute machine learning experiments at scale, giving Reddit additional capacity to discover what works and how to improve its systems for maximum performance, both in terms of topic matching and misuse detection.

According to Reddit:

“With Spell’s technology and expertise, we’ll be able to move faster to integrate ML across our Product, Safety, and Ads teams. Team members from Spell have joined Reddit and will support existing and spearhead new ML projects across the company related to how we identify and classify contextual relevance, organize conversations, customize ad placements, and protect communities.”

This could make it easier for users to see more similar posts and updates, increasing Reddit engagement and making it a more captivating service to contend with other platforms.

Furthermore, Spell has detailed how its automated systems would improve and secure the Reddit experience.

“Reddit is a special place: home to a vast diversity of subreddits dedicated to every interest imaginable, it hosts more real human discussion and connection than any other site of its kind. Reddit’s mission is to bring community, belonging, and empowerment to everyone in the world, and we believe achieving that mission will require a platform that can better understand content, communities, and users.”

It can be a crucial milestone because, according to Reddit's publicly available viewership data, the site is losing momentum as more users move to TikTok for popular memes.

Reddit reported 430 million monthly active users at the end of 2019, however that number was reduced to 52 million daily active users in 2020. Only Reddit knows for sure because there's no conclusive association between daily and monthly usage, but this suggests a drop in subscribers unless only about 12% of its monthly users are logging in on a daily.

However, Reddit Press recently announced that it now has 50 million users.

That indicates that Reddit's user base is dwindling, which is why better contextual matching could be a welcome feature, allowing the app to present more of the finest content to each user.

Since there's a lot of useful information there that relates to particular interests. Reddit simply needs to improve its presentation of such content, and as seen in TikTok, the ability to showcase the best, most relevant content for each user can result in significant engagement gains.

Reddit works similarly to TikTok, with its 'Popular' feed curating the finest content from all over the app rather than restricting your experience to the subreddits and/or persons you follow.

Considering this, Spell's technologies may be just what the platform needs to improve its process.