Reddit Trivia
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115 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 115 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which two University of Virginia roommates founded Reddit together in June 2005?
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were joined that November by Aaron Swartz, when his company Infogami merged with the site.
Q 02Which startup incubator accepted Reddit's founders into its very first class?
Y Combinator
Y Combinator's first class, summer 2005, took Huffman and Ohanian after Paul Graham rejected their text-message food-ordering app My Mobile Menu and told them to come back with a different idea.
Q 03In which programming language did Steve Huffman originally code Reddit?
Common Lisp
Huffman wrote the original site in Common Lisp; in December 2005 it was rewritten in Python, and Swartz's blog post about the switch drew complaints from Lisp fans.
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 05Which company founded by Aaron Swartz merged with Reddit in November 2005?
Infogami
Swartz's wiki-hosting startup Infogami, from the same Y Combinator class, merged with Reddit in November 2005 under a parent called Not A Bug; Swartz was pushed out in January 2007.
Q 06Which magazine publisher bought Reddit on October 31, 2006?
Condé Nast
Condé Nast, publisher of Wired and The New Yorker, bought Reddit on October 31, 2006, sixteen months after the site's June 2005 launch; the team then moved to San Francisco.
Q 07What is the name of the alien mascot in Reddit's logo?
Snoo
Snoo was doodled by Alexis Ohanian while bored in a marketing class at UVA; he 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
Reddit's Snoo guidelines rule out fingers: the mascot's hands stay rounded mitten stubs. Snoo's face must remain blank and neutral, and it 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
Subreddits are Reddit's topic communities; users gained the power to create their own in January 2008, three years after the 2005 launch, while comments had arrived in December 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 redditor's cake day is the anniversary of the account's creation; a small slice-of-cake icon appears beside the username for that day.
Q 13Which subreddit replaced r/all as the default front page for logged-out visitors in 2017?
r/popular
r/popular became the logged-out default in February 2017; unlike r/all it excludes not-safe-for-work communities and subreddits that opt out of appearing there.
Q 21Which 2016 April Fools' experiment let Reddit chat groups vote to merge and double in size?
Robin
Robin, launched April 1, 2016, dropped each user into a small chat that could vote 'Grow' to merge with another group of equal size, producing rooms thousands strong.
Q 22RedditGifts began in 2009 with what event, which grew into a Guinness World Record holder?
A Secret Santa
RedditGifts' first Secret Santa in 2009 drew over 4,000 redditors; by 2014 roughly 200,000 people in 188 countries took part, including Bill Gates and Snoop Dogg, earning a Guinness World Record.
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
Reddit posts are archived six months after submission, closing new votes and comments; since 2021 moderators can switch archiving off for their subreddit.
Q 15What is Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman's well-known Reddit username?
u/spez
Huffman posts as u/spez; co-founder Alexis Ohanian is u/kn0thing and former CEO Yishan Wong is u/yishan. Other famous accounts include u/Poem_for_your_sprog, who replies in verse.
Q 16What was the ad-free premium membership called before it was renamed Reddit Premium in 2018?
Gold
Reddit Gold, launched in 2010, was the ad-free membership; in 2018 it was renamed Reddit Premium and 'Gold' became the name of an award. Subscribers also get the r/lounge subreddit.
Q 17Which digital currency did Reddit begin accepting for Reddit Gold in February 2013?
Bitcoin
Reddit began taking Bitcoin for Reddit Gold in February 2013 through Coinbase; a decade later, in late 2023, it shut down its own Community Points tokens, including r/CryptoCurrency's Moons.
Q 18What was Reddit's 2017 April Fools' experiment where users placed one pixel at a time on a shared canvas?
r/place
r/place ran April 1–3, 2017, one pixel per user every few minutes; it returned in 2022 and 2023, when the canvas filled with protests over Reddit's API pricing.
Q 19Reddit's 2015 April Fools' experiment, The Button, could be clicked how many times per user?
Once
Each account could press The Button only once; it drew just over a million presses before its timer finally ran out on June 5, 2015, starting Reddit's run of April Fools' social experiments.
Q 20On which subreddit do 'Ask Me Anything' interviews traditionally take place?
r/IAmA
r/IAmA hosts Ask Me Anything sessions; Barack Obama answered questions there while campaigning in August 2012, and Bill Gates has done several.
Wikipedia and other sites joined the protest against the Stop Online Piracy and PROTECT IP acts.
Q 24Which comedian's October 2010 rally in Washington grew partly out of a Reddit campaign?
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert's rally answered Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor; user mrsammercer started the push after dreaming of a Colbert rally, and 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
After the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, amateur sleuths on Reddit wrongly named Sunil Tripathi; Reddit apologised for 'online witch hunts', and Tripathi was found to have died by suicide weeks earlier.
Q 26What nickname did the July 2015 moderator blackout over Victoria Taylor's firing get?
AMAgeddon
The blackout was dubbed AMAgeddon because r/IAmA, where Taylor had coordinated interviews, went private first on July 2, 2015; more than 300 subreddits followed, and Reddit's interim CEO resigned days later.
Q 27Who served as Reddit's interim CEO from 2014 until resigning in July 2015?
Ellen Pao
Ellen Pao became interim CEO in November 2014; under her Reddit adopted an anti-harassment policy and banned five harassing subreddits in June 2015, and she resigned on July 10, 2015.
Q 28Why did CEO Yishan Wong say he resigned in 2014?
A dispute over moving the offices to Daly City
Wong said he quit in November 2014 over a dispute with the board about moving Reddit's offices to Daly City, calling the job 'stressful and draining'; monthly users grew from 35 million to 174 million under him.
Q 29How did Steve Huffman describe the look of Reddit's old design when explaining the 2018 redesign?
A 'dystopian Craigslist'
Huffman said the pre-2018 site looked like 'a dystopian Craigslist'; the April 2018 redesign added card and classic views, while users who opted out kept the previous look.
Q 30Which third-party app did Reddit buy in October 2014 to become its official iOS app?
Alien Blue
Reddit bought Jason Morrissey's Alien Blue in October 2014 and made it the official iOS client, replacing the 2009-era iReddit app; Morrissey joined Reddit as part of the deal.