Sam Carow and Mayank Jain

(u/toasties & u/mjmayank)

Reddit has a longstanding tradition of participating in April Fool’s. For the past 5 years, we’ve announced social experiments and encouraged the community to collaborate in different ways.

Our April Fool’s celebration is more than a fun gag, it’s a unique social experiment that gives us insight into our community, and a tool that allows us to test new technologies, understand their impact on our infrastructure and pressure-test new feature performance at scale. More than that, Reddit’s April Fools tradition allows us to engage with the community in new and interesting ways, highlighting emerging behaviors and trends across the platform. It’s one of the best opportunities we have to think philosophically about the Internet and human connection in a very Reddit-y, meta-like fashion.

Circle of Trust

This year, we launched Reddit’s Circle of Trust, an experiment that allowed each user to create one –– and only one –– circle with a title and secret key. Users could invite others to join their circles by sharing the link and a secret key of their choosing. The invited user had the ability to join or betray the circle. If they decided to join, they would grow the circle and were given the option to extend the invitation to other users. If they betrayed the circle, they would close the circle permanently and get marked with a scarlet letter.

Users were also given flair next to their usernames that displayed two separate numbers. The first was the number of people in your personal circle. The second was the number of active circles you joined. If a circle you were in got betrayed, the second number would decrease by one.

Behind-the-scenes

Communication and collaboration are two of the most important themes and factors we consider when coming up with our April Fools experiments. This year, we were particularly influenced by ideas from classic game theory such as the prisoner’s dilemma, board games like Secret Hitler, The Scarlet Letter, and of course, Meet the Parents.

Once we landed on the idea, we started iterating and kicked off the technical implementation.

We were left with just one month to get the code finalized and compatible across 4 different platforms; the old desktop site, the redesign, Android and iOS.

The joke’s on… us?

A few days in advance of our launch, we decided to drop a few hints about what was to come. Our lead backend engineer (u/miamiZ) dropped a subtle comment with an ASCII art snake in a discussion thread about April Fool’s, to symbolize the idea of trust and betrayal. It was a wholesome and friendly exchange, but on April Fool’s morning, users waited for the project to drop. What they didn’t know was that they would have to wait until Monday… April 2.

We started leaving clues, like hidden text in a tooltip over our logo with the intention of acknowledging the community’s curiosity and drumming up further excitement. As it turns out, dragging out the anticipation lead to a bit of confusion and, ultimately, some disappointment, so we decided to officially announce the 4/2 launch.

When we explicitly announced that there was a plan for April Fool’s in-the-works, the mood started to turn around. Our savvy community of redditors started decompiling our Android app, inspecting our minified JavaScript and found references to Circle of Trust.

Launch time

On Monday, April 2, at precisely 9:00 a.m. PT, we launched Circle of Trust. Unfortunately, we hit a snag where we were leaking secret keys due to last-minute code change that made it easier to share your circle. It took another hour, but we were finally ready. Shortly after, we started seeing reports of flairs being slow to update, and users having issues joining and betraying circles.

After a couple hours of things continuing to slow, we decided to temporarily close the subreddit while we investigated. This is where we learned the queue was backed up, meaning users couldn’t see the results of their actions (posts, comments). Here’s how our engineers describe what happened next:

Think of the entrance to your favorite tourist attraction. Generally visitors come in small groups at a steady rate allowing entrance workers to accommodate the flow of traffic. Occasionally a busload of visitors shows up at once, clogging up the line. The entrance can handle a steady stream of buses, but if the group size continues to grow, the swell will overwhelm the entrance workers. During r/CircleofTrust, each time we scaled our infrastructure to accomodating the influx of activities, we allowed for an increase in visitor bus size, which completely overwhelmed our poor entrance workers, stopping people from getting into the main attraction. Once we were able to alleviate the load on the queue, we were able to get back up-and-running, opening up the gates once more, to the main attraction, r/CircleofTrust.

What we learned

We learned a lot from users’ behavior during the experiment too. Specifically, we were interested in learning more about how users’ would go about building trust with strangers. The experiment’s mechanics allowed users to come up with behaviors beyond what we could have predicted, including trusting those with similarly-sized circles, creating mutually-assured destruction and last, but not least, that April Fool’s should be celebrated with a 4/1 launch.

We also observed how users leveraged chat to build a rapport before establishing trust. It became custom for the smaller circle to state their key first. Being involved in a key exchange was nerve-wracking for all, but it also produced our favorite meme from the experiment.

Lastly, we noticed people sending compliments to each other, which proved to be one of the best ways to gain entry, or at the very least, start a conversation. What we learned from our users is that even in the most cut-throat situations, positive engagements was a way to demonstrate good faith and, ultimately, one of the best paths forward when beginning to build trust.

We saw the inverse here too, where redditors would band together to betray as many circles as possible. This group called themselves the Circular Swarm. We guess there will always be people who just want to see the world burn!

All of this, of course, supports what we all know to be true: Our community is smarter, more creative, and always one step ahead of us.

Outcome

Throughout the projects’ many highs and lows, we were reminded that the fact that our community cares enough to engage so enthusiastically is a gift in and of itself. While there are over 138,000 active communities on Reddit, Circle of Trust gave many users their first ever experience creating and effectively running their very own mini-communities. Expanding your circle has its challenges, both online and off-, and our team was happy to get the opportunity to explore some of those challenges through this project.

Until next time…

Special thanks to u/chtorrr, u/crxpy, u/dmoneyyyyy, u/egonkasper, u/ggalex, u/goatfresh, u/kaitaan, u/kethryvis, u/madlee, u/miamiZ, u/rodly, u/therealandytuba, u/wangofchung for their contributions to this project.