Reddit
Showing Signs of Life
TL;DR
Most Redditors drop in, grab an answer, and leave because posting feels high-stakes and the sense of community is invisible. We designed two lightweight ways to feel present among others and to contribute without pressure.
I worked across research, ideation, and design, then led the build: pulling everyone’s pieces into one prototype and iterating on it through user testing.
Background
Belonging is a retention problem
Reddit partnered with our capstone team to study how Gen Z users find community. Participation is the engine of the business, supplying the content and turning visitors into users who stay. Yet over 90% of Redditors are lurkers.
Problem
Easy to consume, hard to belong to
People treat Reddit like a search engine, so we set out to understand what stands between showing up and joining in.
Our North Star
How do we lower the stakes of participating, and make the presence of others felt, so people can move from lurking to belonging?
Research
What a third space needs
We looked for belonging where it already exists: 8 in-depth interviews with Redditors who were also in other online communities and in-person third spaces, plus Reddit’s own internal research and a competitive read of Discord.
“I like the idea of the community, people making friends, joining in on certain topics. It’s just my insecurities would get the better of me if I were to get downvoted.”— P1
Key insights
Posting feels vulnerable
Posting is the only way in, and every post is public, permanent, scored.
The rules gatekeep participation
Every subreddit has its own rules to learn, and removals feel arbitrary.
Nobody becomes a familiar face
Pseudonymity is prized, but affinity grows from seeing the same people.
Discord fills the gap
Most named it as their hub: more personal and easier to be casual.
Process
Designing inside a wicked problem
Lurkers, posters, and moderators need different things, so any fix for one costs the others. Each decision below is a trade-off, made with its cost in view.
Pivoting from arrival to belonging
We initially assumed belonging was an onboarding problem with people not discovering subreddits of interest. Instead, research pointed to social stakes. So we re-scoped midway to prioritize psychological safety.
Widening what counts as participation
The assumed goal would be to convert lurkers into posters, but lurkers make up most of Reddit and matter as much as those who post. We decided to design a belonging that didn’t require contributing content.
Breaking Reddit norms on purpose
Siloed sessions, votes and comments, and permanence were where research found friction, so we deliberately designed outside them.
See who else is here
A live count of people in the subreddit right now, so no session feels solo.
Reacting as participation
Reactions give more nuance than a binary vote and feel less pressure than a thread.
No permanent record
What you share expires in a day, so contributing feels casual.
Respecting Reddit’s constraints
Technical feasibility shaped our ideas. We committed early to Devvit, Reddit’s platform for apps that run natively inside communities, and that set which concept we'd build to ship and which to stress-test.
Thoughts
A lighter, 24-hour post where people react instead of vote or comment.
Build this to ship
Felt Presence
A visualized sense of who else is online, so a subreddit feels like a third space.
Build this to stress-test a concept that re‑imagines belonging
Building mobile-first, where lurkers read
Leading the build, I set up a shared GitHub repo the team could build in together with Claude Code, then pulled everyone’s pieces into one mobile-first prototype and pushed a fresh round to Vercel before every test session.
Testing
Lower stakes landed, but presence needed a purpose
We put an early prototype in front of lurkers and posters. Every participant grasped both concepts on first contact, with no walkthrough.
Thoughts
Ephemeral posts drew genuine curiosity
Read as something Reddit lacks; comfort sharing one averaged 4.7 out of 5.
The value of pseudonymity shaped every privacy question
People asked whether a Thought would ever show on their profile.
Felt Presence
Presence read as live interest, not a count
Seeing where others were gathered told people what to read next in real time.
Charm alone read as a gimmick
Positive first look, but as pure ambience people weren’t sure what it was for.
“I like the post-specific constellation, it’s a fun visualizer. I just don’t know how often I would be going to the main star page.”— P3, lurker
Final Product
Two ways in for the people already there
Thoughts
A short, casual post that lasts 24 hours and then disappears, the step between lurking and a full, permanent one.
Under the hood: Thoughts are comments in Reddit’s data model, which keeps moderation tools working and the format native.
A continuous scroll of Thoughts
Posts sit in their own expandable horizontal row, separate from the feed.
What testing changed: the first version truncated posts, which raised the interaction cost of reading each one. We rebuilt them as full cards, so every post is readable and browsable.
Felt Presence
We wanted a subreddit’s activity to be more than a number. Felt Presence turns that count into a room with members represented as glyphs gathered around posts.
Native to each community: the metaphor changes with the subreddit. In r/space (shown here) members are stars and a crowd is a constellation.
Placed where people already look
From the subreddit header and within any post.
What testing changed: since presence mattered most around what people were reading, each cluster now doubles as navigation into its post.
Impact
Reddit loved it... time to build!
Both concepts went to our Reddit partners and they backed them. Our Community Support Specialist even wants Thoughts in the subreddit he moderates.
Our next step is Devvit, Reddit’s developer platform, where we’ll bring Thoughts to life and pilot it in a real community. While Felt Presence drew plenty of love, it was scoped as a concept from the start, and a concept it shall stay.
Reflections
The trade-offs were the design
With lurkers, posters, mods, and the business all pulling in different directions, no perfect answer existed, so we learned to choose which tensions to hold. For example, Thoughts requires your handle to be shown for accountability and compliance with mod tools, but that means giving up complete anonymity. Our compromise was letting each Thought disappear after 24 hours.
Participation as more than just posting
We began by asking how Reddit could get more people to contribute, and ended somewhere wider. Reading, reacting, and simply being around are all ways of belonging, and almost none of them leave a trace. By designing for those quieter forms, people can feel like they belong before they ever post.
thanks for reading (✿・‿・)ノ゛
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FigBuild 2026
Digital Society Lab