Quiet ads, new features, and an important video

By popular demand, we've spent the last few months experimenting with outsourced ad networks. They all do a great job ensuring we never have unsold ad space. But for the most part, they're terrible at quality control.
We don't want any sleazy ads on reddit. We can't stand ads that make noise without the reader's permission. When trashy ads are reported to us, we kick them off reddit. However, the ad network we've been using the past few weeks has proven to be a infinite game of whack-a-mole. (Why does the administration control panel never have a checkbox that says, "Don't ever show an autoplaying media ad, ever"?)

Due to the lack of such controls, we just kicked that entire ad network off our site. If you somehow see another evil ad on reddit (or if you know of an ad network that lets site owners exercise high quality standards) please write to us immediately. We really do want to hear about it, because we firmly believe in not torturing our community.

Now on to more pleasant news: we have some new features to announce!

The first batch are due to our move to the latest version of Discount, which provides a number of improvements to reddit's commenting syntax.

You know how when you type "look_of_disapproval" it comes out like "lookofdispproval" and then you're like darn it and you have to go back and add backslashes and it's annoying? Never again. Underscores in the middle of words will no longer be treated as italics markers. You can still emphasize the middle of a word with asterisks.

Another fun feature: strikethrough! To use it, surround the word in question with double squiggles, as in: "They're called tildes, ~~idiot~~ good sir."

But wait, there's more: You can now do superscript via the ^ character. This one is still a bit experimental; we don't want to overload our servers with lots of really big numbers, so for the first 24 hours, the use of exponents larger than 2 will be restricted to reddit gold subscribers, who I trust will be discreet about using this special ability in front of less fortunate members of the community.

More good news for subscribers: the button that used to load 1000 comments at once has been upgraded to now load 1500 comments with a single click. So if you have reddit gold, you'll be seeing "load more comments" less than ever before.

If you're not a reddit gold subscriber, now's the perfect time to join. Why? Well, just watch this helpful video made for us by the Upright Citizens Brigade. It should make everything crystal clear:



If that doesn't convince you, we don't know what will. Sign up for reddit gold today.