We’ve always been impressed with the sheer variety of community renditions of Snoo, reddit’s alien mascot. Over the years redditors have customized Snoo in a staggering variety of ways to serve as the logo for thousands of subreddits. The inventiveness of the reddit community has inspired us to launch customizable reddit alien avatars, which we have dubbed snoovatars.

If you have reddit gold, please dive right in and create your snoovatar by following the link from the sidebar of your userpage. If you set your snoovatar to be public, other users will be able to see it too. Quite spiffing!

If you don’t have reddit gold, consider purchasing some, sending us a postcard or making an exceptionally witty/insightful/stupid comment and hoping a kindly passing stranger gilds it.

get reddit gold

We’ll be adding extra item options to snoovatars over time. We’d also love to continue the tradition of community collaboration for snoovatars and will be adding your suggestions in the future! If you have an idea for an item you’d like to see included as an option for your snoovatar, make a post on /r/snoovatars. You can also discuss the project and share your creation.

History Time with /u/kn0thing

I doodled the reddit alien while I was bored in class my senior year at UVA. It’s called ‘snoo’ because that’s what Steve & I originally wanted to call reddit (expecting people would say: ‘what’s snoo?’ and we’d say – exactly!). The guy who owned the domain wouldn’t sell for less than a few grand and since we didn’t have that kind of money, I picked reddit and we named the alien ‘snoo.’ It is a genderless, time-traveling alien from the future and it is a blank canvas, because it can represent any one of us, it represents all of us. One of the first things I did was make a personalized snoo for Steve and then myself. Now, I’m excited to say that as we approach our 10 year anniversary, that is now available to anyone with reddit gold.

Begone ‘Edit: thanks for the gold!!’

As well as allowing you to include your username and a message upon gilding, we also recently added an option to allow you to reply directly to your gilder. Not only do you no longer have to edit in an Oscar-worthy acceptance speech, but if your benefactor is anonymous they will have the option to reply to your message and reveal themselves. You can read more about this feature here.

/u/sername mentions for all!

In keeping with our policy for gradually un-gating reddit gold features, we have also rolled outusername mentions to the masses. From this day forth, everyone, not just the gilded elite, will receive a PM when their username is mentioned. If you’d prefer not to receive notifications when your username is mentioned you can disable the feature on your preferences page. Read more about this feature here.

Gold Partner Updates

We’ve also added a handful of great partners & benefits to our gold benefits program.

VyprVPN – VPN service

3 months free on an annual subscription

Rusty Frets – boutique guitar shop

15% discount on any purchase

Carved – real wood phone cases

20% discount on any purchase

Casper – a well designed mattress

$60 discount

You can see all our partners & benefits here.