The History and Future of Machine Learning at Reddit

Let’s take a walk through the history of machine learning at Reddit from its original days in 2006 to where we are today, including the pitfalls and mistakes made as well as their current ML projects and future efforts in the space. Based on a talk given by Anand Mariappan, the Senior Director of ML at Reddit, at ODSC West 2018, we’ll cover data platform, ML efforts around anti-evil, abuse, feed ranking, recommendations, user and subreddit similarity, as well as business results achieved and how they measure those through our experiments systems.

[Related Article: IBM Research Launches Explainable AI Toolkit]

First, What is Reddit?

Reddit, at its core, is a social network of communities that helps users find people with similar passions and connect around those ideas. It’s designed to allow open interaction and shared information, without the other pressures of modern social media. It has incredible engagement and is a bigger platform than even users know it to be.

This is all achieved through four different features.