What did Reddit announce on October 28, 2026?
On October 28, 2026, Reddit introduced a home feed built around two tabs: For You and Following. The company announced the change in a blog post titled “Explore More Communities with Reddit’s New Feed Updates.” Reddit said the experience will roll out globally over the next few weeks. By launch day it was already live for many users in the United States, Mashable reported. Reddit did not specify which countries would receive the change first, or whether every platform would get it at once.
For You combines posts from communities a user has joined with recommendations based on that user’s interests. Following shows only posts from communities the user has joined. People can switch tabs at any time, and Reddit reopens on whichever feed they used last. The post does not describe changes to communities, voting, comments or moderator rules.
The change matters because it turns recommendations into a destination rather than a garnish. Reddit has long mixed suggested posts from outside a user’s subscriptions into the home feed, as TechCrunch noted. The difference is placement. Suggestions now get their own tab at the top of the homepage, where they compete with communities a person chose.
The audience is large. Reddit reported 130.3 million daily active uniques in the second quarter of 2026. Its standard company description cites more than 26 billion posts and comments. Any redesign of the home feed therefore shapes how tens of millions of people encounter news, advice and niche communities every day.
Reddit’s framing is aspirational rather than technical. The blog post says “a more human internet is not just something you sit back and watch.” It argues that discovery should lead people to participate. TechCrunch summarized the stated goals as connection, participation and belonging. Those are the company’s words, not measured outcomes.
How do the For You and Following feeds work?
Reddit has described the purpose of the new tab in general terms, not technical ones. The blog post says “good recommendations should help people follow an interest into a community, and from there, into a conversation.” That sentence is the clearest statement of intent the company has published so far.
For You blends two sources: communities you belong to, and communities the system thinks you might like. Following is the narrower option, limited to communities you joined. Reddit calls it “a focused way to catch up” on those specific communities. Reddit describes switching as effortless, and the app remembers the last choice.
The company frames the launch as a first step toward better discovery. It says it will keep testing interest-based navigation. It also promises more controls, including the ability to hide posts and to flag what someone wants to see less of. Reddit describes that feedback as a way to make recommendations more relevant over time. The post says the company will “keep experimenting with ways people can more intentionally explore Reddit,” including navigation built around interests. That language casts the two tabs as a starting point rather than a finished design.
Several important details are missing from the announcement. Reddit has not published the signals its ranking system uses. Nor has it said what share of a typical For You feed is recommended content rather than posts from joined communities. It has also not confirmed whether For You will become the default tab for new or existing users. Those specifics should be treated as unconfirmed until Reddit documents them.
What is clear is the direction of travel. Reddit says it wants recommendations to move people from an interest into a community, and from a community into a conversation. The new tab moves that journey to the top of the product, rather than leaving it to a sidebar experiment.
Why is Reddit adding a For You feed now?
Reddit has not tied the feed change to revenue targets, but its recent results show why discovery matters to the business. In the second quarter of 2026, revenue reached $805 million, up 61% year over year. Advertising contributed $762 million of that total, a 64% increase. Net income was $253 million, or 31% of revenue.
Growth was fastest outside the United States. US revenue rose 56% to $638 million, while international revenue rose 84% to $167 million. Daily active uniques grew 18% to 130.3 million, and weekly active uniques grew 24% to 514.6 million, crossing half a billion. The company also noted eight consecutive quarters of revenue growth above 60%.
A feed that surfaces unexpected communities can extend sessions, and longer sessions create more advertising inventory. That is an inference from Reddit’s business model, not a claim the company has made about this rollout. Reddit guided third-quarter revenue to $860 million to $870 million and adjusted EBITDA to $385 million to $395 million. It reports those results after the market close on October 29, 2026.
The timing is notable for a second reason. The third-quarter report lands one day after the feed announcement, so it will capture none of the change’s effects. Any shift in engagement, ad impressions or user growth would first appear in fourth-quarter reporting. The next two quarters are the real test of whether the new tab works.
The move also continues a longer shift toward personalization. In April 2026, Reddit took the final steps to deprecate r/all, the less-filtered list of the site’s most popular posts. Links to r/all now redirect to the Home feed, and trending content remains available through r/popular. Mashable quoted a Reddit changelog describing the work as an effort to “improve Home feed personalization.” That phrase fits the new tabs closely.
How is Reddit’s For You feed different from TikTok, Instagram or X?
TikTok popularized the For You page, and the format has spread widely since. Instagram, X, Threads and Facebook all run recommendation-driven feeds, TechCrunch noted when covering Reddit’s launch. Reddit is late to that pattern rather than unusual, and the borrowed name makes the lineage obvious.
The main difference is what gets recommended. On short-video apps, the unit is a clip, and feeds are tuned for watch time. On Reddit, recommendations point toward communities, each with its own rules, volunteer moderators and regulars. A recommended post is usually an invitation to a place, not just a piece of content.
The content is also discussion-first. Much of Reddit is text posts, links and long comment threads. Those behave differently from short video and from image-first feeds. Reddit has kept Following as an equal tab rather than burying chronological subscriptions in a menu. That is a meaningful concession to users who treat the site as a subscription service rather than an entertainment stream.
The naming is borrowed wholesale. TikTok’s For You page made the phrase a generic label for an algorithmic stream. Other apps adopted it because people already recognize it. Reddit keeps the label while attaching it to communities rather than individual creators. That is the closest thing to a design distinction in an otherwise familiar pattern.
Whether the community structure softens the usual criticisms of algorithmic feeds is an open question. Comment threads can supply context that a bare recommendation lacks, because readers see the pushback as well as the claim. They can also carry pile-ons into small communities that never asked for the attention. That is a moderators’ problem, not an algorithmic one.
Reddit’s own description leans on that community framing. The blog post talks about “thousands of communities” and about discovery helping people encounter perspectives that broaden their own. That is a claim about design intent. It is not evidence that the ranking system produces that result.
What does the change mean for moderators and smaller communities?
For moderators, the practical effect is who arrives in a thread. Recommendations can send outsiders into conversations they would never have found by browsing their own subscriptions. For a small community, that can mean new members, more activity and a clearer path to growth.
It can also mean comments from people who do not know the local rules. Moderators enforce those rules themselves, usually without pay, and they decide what counts as on-topic in their own spaces. The announcement does not describe new moderation tools, traffic dashboards or warnings for communities that receive sudden bursts of recommended visitors. Small communities have the most to gain from that exposure, and the least information about what is happening to them.
Reddit says the feed will come with more user controls over time, starting with hiding posts and signaling disinterest. Those controls act on what a person sees, not on who may post or comment in a community. Moderators therefore inherit the consequences of recommendation decisions they do not make and cannot inspect in detail.
The change also continues a shift that began with r/all’s retirement. Reddit once had a shared front page that every visitor could inspect. It made the site’s overall amplification easy to see. Discovery now happens inside a personalized feed that differs from user to user and is harder to audit from the outside.
Reddit argues that this personalization helps people find communities they would otherwise miss, especially on a site with thousands of active spaces. The counterargument is that a shared front page creates a common reference point, and that losing it fragments attention. Both claims are plausible, and neither can be settled with the data Reddit has published.
Can you opt out of the For You feed?
Partly, and only at the tab level. Selecting Following gives users a feed made solely of communities they joined. Reddit says people can switch whenever they like and that the app will remember their last choice. A user who stays on Following keeps the subscription-only experience on mobile.
Inside For You, no setting lets a user remove recommendations entirely. Reddit says it is experimenting with tools to hide posts and to indicate what people want to see less of. Those are filters, not an off switch. The company has not said when they will ship or how much they will change the mix.
Desktop users have another option in old.reddit.com, though it is narrowing. On October 1, 2026, Reddit said it would soon restrict Old Reddit to logged-in users who had used it in the previous six months. Moderators are exempt, according to Mashable’s report on an r/modnews post.
Old Reddit also preserves r/all, Mashable reported in April, even though links to r/all elsewhere redirect to the Home feed. For anyone who wants the site’s older, less personalized experience, the technical routes are shrinking. The main product is becoming more algorithmic at the same time.
The practical answer for most people is simple. If you want only your communities, stay on the Following tab. If curiosity is the point, For You is designed for that. What is not available, as of the announcement, is a setting that keeps recommendations out of the home feed for good.
What are the limits, and what should you watch next?
The evidence base for judging the feed is thin. Reddit has published a short blog post and a set of talking points, not an algorithm paper. Reddit has not published an independent audit of the recommendation system. No public data shows how much of a For You feed is recommended content. Nothing shows how often users switch tabs, or whether recommendation traffic reaches previously invisible communities.
Early reactions were mixed. TechCrunch reported that some testers complained in Reddit’s r/help forum about seeing posts from communities they had not joined. The size of that backlash, and whether it persists after the global rollout, is unknown. Reddit’s own framing suggests it expects familiarity to build over time.
Financial effects will take time to appear. The third-quarter results due on October 29 predate the feed change. Any engagement or advertising impact would first surface in fourth-quarter reporting. Even then, it would be tangled with seasonal ad demand and other product experiments.
Whether Reddit makes For You the default tab. That decision would change the experience for people who never choose, and Reddit has not answered it publicly.
Whether the promised controls arrive. Hiding individual posts is a weak remedy if the recommendation share stays fixed. The useful test is whether users can dial the mix down, not delete one card at a time.
How the change affects traffic that leaves Reddit. Publishers and smaller sites have come to rely on Reddit links and search visibility. A feed that favors on-platform discussion could change referral patterns, and nobody is measuring that publicly.
Whether moderators get better data. Traffic dashboards showing where readers came from would let communities see the effect on their own threads. Otherwise they infer it from unfamiliar usernames in the comments.