120 free Reddit trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Reddit trivia quiz covers the self-styled front page of the internet from a University of Virginia dorm room to the New York Stock Exchange. It opens with the origin story: two roommates at a Paul Graham lecture, a rejected food-ordering app, Y Combinator's first class, a site coded in Common Lisp and padded with fake users, the merger with Aaron Swartz's Infogami and the 2006 sale to Condé Nast for a reported $10-20 million. The middle of the quiz is about how the site works and the culture around it: subreddits and moderators, upvotes and karma, cake day, r/popular versus r/all, Reddit Gold and Premium, the alien mascot Snoo and the rules on drawing him, the world-record Secret Santa, the April Fools experiments r/place and the Button, and the AMAs by Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Cookie Monster. The last stretch covers the crises and milestones: the SOPA blackout, the Boston Marathon misidentification, AMAgeddon and Ellen Pao's exit, the GameStop short squeeze on r/wallstreetbets, the 2023 API pricing revolt, the Google and OpenAI data deals and the March 2024 IPO under the ticker RDDT. Questions range from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia article on Reddit.
30 of 120 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which two University of Virginia roommates founded Reddit in June 2005?
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian
They were joined by Aaron Swartz that November when his company Infogami merged with the site.
Q 02Which startup incubator accepted Reddit's founders into its very first class?
Y Combinator
They had pitched Paul Graham a text-message food-ordering app called My Mobile Menu, which flopped, before he suggested 'the front page of the Internet'.
Q 03In which programming language did Steve Huffman originally code Reddit?
Common Lisp
Aaron Swartz later helped rewrite it in Python using his web.py framework, to the annoyance of the Lisp community.
Q 04How did Reddit's founders make the site look busier in its first weeks?
They created hundreds of fake user accounts
They were embarrassed by how empty the site looked, so they posted under invented names.
Q 05What was the name of Aaron Swartz's company that merged with Reddit in 2005-06?
Infogami
The merged parent was called Not A Bug; Swartz was fired in January 2007 after blogging about the corporate atmosphere.
Q 06Which magazine publisher bought Reddit on October 31, 2006?
Condé Nast
The reported price was $10-20 million; the site became an independent subsidiary of parent Advance Publications in 2011.
Q 07What is the name of the alien mascot in Reddit's logo?
Snoo
Alexis Ohanian doodled it while bored in a marketing class at UVA and wanted to call it S'new, a play on 'What's new?'.
Q 08According to Reddit's 2018 design rules, which of these is Snoo NOT allowed to have?
Fingers
Snoo's head must always appear blank or neutral, and the mascot is genderless so subreddits can restyle it freely.
Q 09The name 'Reddit' is a play on which phrase?
Read it
As in 'I read it on Reddit'; user names begin with u/ and community names with r/.
Q 10What are Reddit's user-created topic communities officially called?
Subreddits
They were introduced in 2008, three years after launch; comments had arrived in 2005.
Q 11What is the status score that Reddit users earn from their posts and comments called?
Karma
Some subreddits require a minimum karma and account age before you can post, to keep out bots and spammers.
Q 12What do redditors call the anniversary of the day their account was created?
Cake day
A small slice-of-cake icon appears beside the username for 24 hours.
Q 13Which subreddit replaced r/all as the default front page for logged-out visitors in 2017?
r/popular
r/popular excludes not-safe-for-work communities; r/all originally filtered nothing but has excluded NSFW content since 2021.
Q 21Which sitting US president took part in a Reddit AMA while campaigning for the 2012 election?
Barack Obama
Donald Trump also did one while campaigning; Reddit later built a dedicated app for the AMA subreddit in 2014.
Q 22RedditGifts began in 2009 with what event, which grew into a Guinness World Record holder?
A Secret Santa
About 4,500 redditors took part the first year; by 2014 around 200,000 people from 188 countries were involved, including Bill Gates and Snoop Dogg.
Q 23Which two pieces of proposed US legislation prompted Reddit's 12-hour blackout on January 18, 2012?
SOPA and PIPA
Q 14After how long are Reddit posts sometimes automatically archived, closing votes and comments?
Six months
Front-page rank depends on a post's age, its upvote-to-downvote ratio and its total vote count.
Q 15What is Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman's well-known Reddit username?
u/spez
Other famous redditors include u/Poem_for_your_sprog, who replies in verse, and u/Shitty_Watercolour, who replies with paintings.
Q 16What was the ad-free premium membership called before it was renamed Reddit Premium in 2018?
Gold
Subscribers get an ad-free site, the exclusive r/lounge subreddit and a personalised 'snoovatar'.
Q 17Which digital currency did Reddit begin accepting for Reddit Gold in February 2013?
Bitcoin
Years later it launched its own token, Reddit Moons, which crashed more than 90% when it was wound down in 2023.
Q 18What was Reddit's 2017 April Fools' experiment where users placed one pixel at a time on a shared canvas?
r/place
It was so successful it returned in 2022 and 2023, though the third run was heavily protested during the API dispute.
Q 19Reddit's 2015 April Fools' experiment, The Button, could be clicked how many times per user?
Once
It attracted more than a million clicks; since 2013 the site's April Fools pranks have taken the form of massive social experiments.
Q 20On which subreddit do 'Ask Me Anything' interviews traditionally take place?
r/IAmA
Barack Obama did one while campaigning in 2012, and Bill Gates has done several; Cookie Monster and Borat have appeared in character.
Wikipedia and other sites joined the protest against the Stop Online Piracy and PROTECT IP acts.
Q 24Which comedian's October 2010 rally grew partly out of a Reddit campaign called 'Restoring Truthiness'?
Stephen Colbert
User mrsammercer started it after dreaming of a Colbert rally; redditors raised over $100,000 for charity to get his attention.
Q 25After which 2013 event did a Reddit sleuthing subreddit wrongly name missing student Sunil Tripathi as a suspect?
The Boston Marathon bombing
General manager Erik Martin apologised for the 'online witch hunts'; Tripathi was later confirmed to have died by suicide before the bombing.
Q 26What nickname did the July 2015 moderator blackout over Victoria Taylor's firing get?
AMAgeddon
Interim CEO Ellen Pao resigned days later, on July 10, and Steve Huffman returned as chief executive.
Q 27Who served as Reddit's interim CEO from 2014 until resigning in July 2015?
Ellen Pao
Under her the site adopted an anti-harassment policy and banned the 150,000-subscriber r/fatpeoplehate.
Q 28Why did CEO Yishan Wong say he resigned in 2014?
A dispute over moving the offices to Daly City
He also called the job 'stressful and draining'; the user base had grown from 35 million to 174 million during his tenure.
Q 29How did Steve Huffman describe the look of Reddit's old design when explaining the 2018 redesign?
A 'dystopian Craigslist'
Users can still opt out by visiting old.reddit.com, though the dedicated login flow was removed from it in May 2024.
Q 30Which third-party app did Reddit buy in October 2014 to become its official iOS app?
Alien Blue
It was retired in April 2016 when Reddit: The Official App launched; the 2009 original app was called iReddit.