reddit Mod World 2023
Every year, Reddit hosts an event for their moderators to show their appreciation and provide important updates about the website.
This year, our task was to completely revamp the event with an entirely new look and feel and a completely live, variety show style approach. Most importantly, out job was to not let down the avid users of the 18th most used website in the entire world.
In the months leading up to Mod World, Reddit was facing a less than enthusiastic audience. In the wake of site wide blackout protests, part of our challenge was to create an event cool enough to be worth attending and honest enough for people to walk away feeling like their concerns were heard.
I’m pleased to say we brought coolness and honesty in spades.
Art Direction: Ely Arce
Like, Live - Live
This was the first event I’ve ever produced that was truly live. We had panels with the CEO of Reddit, interviews with Mods, and 37 pieces of pre-filmed content (from bedtime stories for viewers in different timezones to trivia to community spotlights to infinitely scrolling “oddly satisfying” feeds). With 4+ hours of content to steam live to viewers all across the world, the stakes were pretty high.
Tonally, we knew we this whole event had to pass the Reddit vibe check: cool, but not cringe-y, relevant, but not try hard, and Reddit-y while respecting that the audience knew more about Reddit than we ever could. It was a tightrope walk we thankfully managed to cross.
Just check out this quote from a satisfied Mod World viewer…
“Props to the people who put this thing together. It was way less cringe then I thought it would be.”
— u/usernameredacted
