What happened
On February 15, 2017, Reddit introduced r/popular, a curated front page shown to logged-out visitors and new users in place of the long-standing system of administrator-selected default subreddits. Reddit acknowledged that hand-picking a default set had effectively editorialized the site, and r/popular was meant to surface a broader, more representative cross-section of active communities. Functioning similarly to r/all, it applied stricter filtering: NSFW and 18+ communities, certain heavily contentious subreddits, and those that opted out were excluded.
The change retired the familiar list of defaults that had shaped many users' first impressions of Reddit for years and gave the company an algorithmically driven, more sanitized public entry point. It was part of a broader 2017 push — alongside the funding round and the planned site redesign — to make Reddit more welcoming and intelligible to newcomers, reducing the chance that a casual visitor's first view would be dominated by a narrow or polarizing set of communities.