From “what's new online”
to “The heart of the internet”

The July 2005 capture is the oldest homepage we found. The alien mascot stands beside a lowercase reddit, followed by four tabs: hottest, newest, recently promoted and top all-time. There are no thumbnails, no comment links and no categories. Item 3 is Armstrong wins final Tour de France. Item 13 is Top 10 Web fads - CNET.com.

On the right are a login box and a list headed daily top posters: Meegan, zaz, rtm, webbuzzard and quadari. Bugbear isn’t on it. Reddit’s own 2025 retrospective says the site began as a web page of 25 links from across the internet.^[2] This page shows 50, and a link under the last one says View More.

Reddit wasn’t Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian’s first idea. That was a food-ordering mobile app called My Mobile Menu, and it was rejected.^[3]

The alien has a name, too. Paul Graham, an early investor, wrote that the founders would have liked to call the site Snoo, as in "What snoo?", but the domain was too expensive. So the name went to the alien.^[4]

By New Year’s Day 2006 the boosts are gone. A January 1, 2006 capture of the same address counts points, and every title has a comment link under it. We don’t know the day the word changed.

Comments had arrived in between. In the thread that announced them, a user called charlieb replied: I for one welcome our new comment spam overlords.^[5] By June the top link, Why childless people hate me., has 137 points and 97 comments. A yellow strip explains the site: reddit is a source for what's new and popular online. The tab reads reddit.com: what's new online, and the logo has a small flag and a gold cup drawn into it.

On October 31, 2006, Wired Digital announced that it had bought Reddit.^[6] The June 2007 capture looks almost the same. The logo now sits on an orange block, and a small box lists popular subreddits: programming and science. Item 2, with 997 points, is MIRACLE! Image of Flying Spaghetti Monster appears in the sky [Pic].

The June 2008 page lets the visitor choose what the list is made of. A sidebar box headed Customize your reddit says Select which communities you want to see, with a checkbox beside each one: reddit.com, worldnews, WTF, pics, gaming, Economics, linux and one called obama. Each link now says where it was posted, as in submitted 4 hours ago by RetroRock to pics.

The top link that day comes from Reddit’s own blog: blog.reddit - We've open sourced reddit!, submitted by spez, with 1397 points. Look just above the alien’s head in the logo. A small orange word says OPEN.

In June 2009 a strip across the very top lists communities in capitals: MY REDDITS, then REDDIT.COM, PICS, POLITICS, FUNNY and WORLDNEWS. The first item is an ad, marked sponsored link: the alien in a suit and tie beside We've launched a job board. The sidebar offers Create your own reddit, with a joke: ...because nothing in life is free (except reddits!)

A year later the joke reads ...because you hate freedom.

The June 2010 sidebar ad is a beer mug next to the alien, June 16, 7:00PM and, in a red band, E3 Expo/LA meetup! Beer! The capture is from June 15, the day before. The strip at the top now includes IAMA, TODAYILEARNED and TREES.

That August, after a Digg redesign, Digg’s users held an “Abandon Digg Day”. StatCounter called August 30, 2010 Redd Monday and recorded a shift of referral traffic toward Reddit that day.^[7]

The June 2011 tab reads reddit: the voice of the internet -- news before it happens. The sponsored slot has a cartoon thumbnail and the line Shut Up And Take My Money! Cool stuff You Can Buy On The Web. Four rows down, users have voted a complaint up to 1616 points: This Sponsored Ad is a Huge Scam... Shame on Reddit for Allowing it.

The sidebar ad is for a game, MEME INVADERS. WIRED reported 1,000,404,480 pageviews for January 2011, counted by Google Analytics (reported).^[8]

On January 18, 2012 there is no list. The capture from 22:03 UTC is a dark page with a small alien, the words REDDIT IS DOWN and a countdown, -02:56:05. The headline in our still says SOPA and PIPA damage Wikipedia. and under it, in orange, today we fight back.

In the page’s code the same line ends damage reddit., so the last word seems to change while the page runs. The tab says reddit is offline in protest of PIPA and SOPA.

The blackout ran from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern.^[9] This capture was taken at 5:03 p.m. Eastern, with about three hours to go, and the countdown agrees.

Down the right side runs a column of live updates. One reads .@mchammer taking the mic at #blackout #nosopasf protest. Lower in the page’s code is another: Well played @Fark has gone WHITE in SUPPORT of SOPA/PIPA!

In June 2013 the tab shows the title that appears most often in our captures: reddit: the front page of the internet. Under the logo, a striped banner says reddit's stories are created by its users. The top link reads The rallies in Hong Kong happening right now to protect Snowden. Halfway down the sidebar is a small cream-colored box: reddit gold: for that special someone. Under it, smaller: yes, you can give it to yourself.

A year later the banner explains the site again: reddit is a platform for internet communities. A line of trending subreddits appears above the list. The gold box has become a progress bar, daily reddit gold goal, at 70%, with a button: help support reddit. The top link is After losing the game in World Cup, the japanese fans cleaned the stadium.

On April 1, 2015 Reddit launched a button with a 60-second countdown that started over each time someone pressed it.^[10] The rule on the page was short: You can only press the button once. The April 1 capture of r/thebutton counts the participants.

Our June 15, 2015 homepage capture shows no button or participant counter. The top of that page is a wide blue bar, subscribe to our newsletter, get the best of reddit, delivered once a week, above the usual ranked list. The gold goal stands at 52%.

The February 2016 capture keeps the newsletter bar. The line at the top right now says Want to join? Log in or sign up in seconds., and the trending line lists /r/StardewValley. The gold goal is at 54%.

One word changes at the top of the June 2017 page. After the MY SUBREDDITS menu, the strip of communities used to begin with FRONT. Now it begins with POPULAR. In February 2017 Reddit introduced r/popular and wrote: Logged out users will land on “popular” by default.^[13] The archive’s crawler is a logged-out visitor, so this is the feed it was handed. Scores are rounded now: 18.6k, 15.1k, 48.9k.

That April Fools’ Day Reddit had opened r/place, a blank shared canvas. By Reddit’s count, more than a million participants placed about 16 million tiles.^[14] In August, Reddit began hosting videos itself.^[15]

The September 2018 page opens with a bright cartoon banner around the white alien: Welcome to Reddit., with a capital R, and a blue button, BECOME A REDDITOR. The top post, Return to Sender, comes from v.redd.it, Reddit’s own video address, with 0:09 on its thumbnail.

This is still the old list, five months after Reddit began rolling out a redesign. WIRED reported that the new look first reached about 1% of users, on April 2.^[16] The archive’s logged-out visitor still got the list.

April 2 was also the day of that year’s April Fools’ game, one day late. Reddit’s own account begins: On Monday, April 2, at precisely 9:00 a.m. PT, we launched Circle of Trust.^[17]

The June 2019 capture is the first in our set with the redesign. The logo is a flat orange circle with a white alien, beside a gray wordmark. Two buttons say LOG IN and SIGN UP. Posts are white cards with large titles, like What do you genuinely just not understand?, with a score of 30.5k and 21.0k Comments. The second card is basketball news: The Pelicans have agreed to a deal to trade Anthony Davis to the Lakers.

A row of controls above the feed reads VIEW, SORT and HOT. The three icons after VIEW switch between the redesign’s card, classic and compact layouts (reported).^[16] Further down, a video post in r/aww, Puppy therapy, fills the width of its card. We blurred the people in it.

In June 2020 the list is back. The archive’s crawler was served the old design again, under a new banner: Welcome to Reddit. Come for the cats, stay for the empathy. A notice under it reads Visit r/Coronavirus to talk about COVID-19, and visit CDC.gov to get the latest information and updates. The top post, Supreme Court rules workers can't be fired for being gay or transgender, has a score of 152k.

The June 2021 banner returns to the old slogan: Welcome to Reddit, the front page of the internet. A dark box in the sidebar sells reddit premium. The top post, from r/gaming, is a photo of toy shelves titled Toys R Us in June 2000.

The December 2022 capture is the new web app, and the tab has a new name: Reddit - Dive into anything. A left column lists FEEDS and TOPICS: Gaming, Sports, Crypto, Television, Celebrity. At the top, Trending today shows four white placeholder cards, with gray bars where pictures and titles should be.

In March 2023 Reddit announced an updated web platform.^[18] Our June 16, 2023 capture shows the old list once more, with Come for the cats, stay for the empathy. and popular in: Everywhere, and the tab is back to reddit: the front page of the internet. (A November 2023 capture of the new app came with Request failed error boxes, so we used this one.)

Each browser-tab title in our captures, listed at the first capture that shows it after a different one:

On November 29, 2023, Reddit announced a new identity: new typefaces, a new wordmark and a 3D Snoo that, in Reddit’s words, even has opposable thumbs for the first time.^[19] The March 2024 capture has the new orange wordmark beside an orange speech-bubble shape. Trending tiles run across the top: Blake Lively apology, Overwatch 2 PvE, Moscow attack. Four days earlier Reddit had priced its stock market debut at $34 a share.^[20]

The tab of the September 2025 capture reads Reddit - The heart of the internet. The alien is back in the logo, inside an orange bubble. r/AskReddit shows 57,082,707 members. The top post is a screenshot of a text-message chat about a date, and its vote button reads 7.2K.

The March 2026 capture shows only the orange wordmark. The search box in the middle of the header says Find anything, with a small alien on its left and a button on its right: Ask. The trending tiles include Vote in the Internet Awards and Neil Sedaka dead at 86. Most videos in this capture render as black boxes.

In August 2026 Reddit wrote that it would continue to require users to be logged in to use Old Reddit, the list design these captures kept returning to.^[21]

2005 · boosts2026 · tiles

◀ ▶

In July 2005 the top link on reddit.com had 5 boosts, and one user had posted 22 of the 50 links on the page. In June 2020 the top post had 152k. By 2025 the count sits inside a rounded button, 7.2K, with no word after it.

The vote arrows are still there. The same pair, one up and one down, sits beside the first link in 2005 and beside the 7.2K in 2025.