Reddit’s 2026 Creative Trends Report Is Brilliant. It’s Also an Autopsy of Authenticity
Reddit's own creative studio published a trends report that is sharp, well-observed, and, well unsettling. This is what happens when you read it slowly and notice what it reveals about authenticity, attention, and the early internet we can't manufacture back.
Back in the glorious ‘90s, sixteen-year-old me used to visit a forum that had no design to speak of. Grey background, blue hyperlinks, and a serif font that I’m pretty sure nobody chose intentionally.
People argued about ideas and current affairs on it. They posted under names like inkblot_77 and the_real_scott. Nobody knew if they were teenagers or professors. It didn't matter because the quality of the argument was the only currency. I would spend hours there.
I thought about that forum recently when I read a document published by Reddit's in-house creative studio, KarmaLab. It's titled Creative Trends for Reddit-First Campaigns in 2026, and it is, on its surface, a strategy brief for brands. But I kept turning it over in my hands (intellectually, I mean) because it is also, without quite meaning to be, an extraordinarily precise autopsy of what happened to the internet I grew up on, and why its ghost is now worth money.
The report opens with nostalgia as strategy. Brands, it notes, are "revisiting their roots from the '90s and early 2000s as they resurface old logos, revive original packaging, and nod to the lifestyle of that era." The target audience is both Millennials who lived it and Gen Z who didn't, but who have "adopted Millennial nostalgia as an aesthetic." For Gen Z, the report argues, that era "represents a sense of emotional safety, simplicity, and authenticity that feels absent from today's hyper-optimized digital world."
I read that sentence three times, and loved how cleanly it named something I had been circling for months without landing on. The early internet is being mourned by people who never inhabited it. They are grieving a texture — low-res, unmonetised, a little hazy — that they encountered only as ruins, the way you might develop a longing for a city you've only ever seen in someone else's photographs.
What was that texture, exactly? I've been trying to be precise about it. It wasn't the slowness, though there was slowness. It wasn't the absence of focus on aesthetics, though there was that too. It was something closer to inconsequence — the radical unimportance of the whole enterprise. Nobody was watching. Nobody was counting. When I posted on that forum at sixteen, there was no number that would rise or fall depending on whether strangers approved. The attention I brought to it was, in Simone Weil's sense, genuinely offered — given freely, without the coiled expectation of return. It was attention before attention became a resource.
This is precisely what KarmaLab has identified as valuable. And this is precisely where the document becomes, for me, genuinely strange to hold.
Because the report is not content to observe this quality from a distance. It wants to operationalise it. It instructs brands to "embrace low-fi, imperfect creative on purpose." It advises them to use "human language" over "polished brand language," to "embrace Reddit's syntax, including typos, sarcasm, cultural shorthand." It suggests that "perfection reads as suspicious." In the section on user-generated social proof, it offers what I think is the report's most revealing line: "Featuring Reddit commentary 'as-is' doesn't just show trust. It signals confidence."
Signals. That word is doing a great deal of work there. Because a signal is not the thing itself. A signal is what you emit when you want to be read as the thing without the costly, inefficient business of actually being it. Authenticity, in this framework, is a creative direction. Imperfection is a production choice. The texture of real is something you can render.
I don't say this to be contemptuous of the document. It is a smart document, written by someone who clearly understands Reddit's communities with genuine care. The section on niche campaigns — "subreddits aren't audiences, they're cultural engines" — is the kind of line I'd write. And the argument for campaigns that unfold rather than launch, that treat brand storytelling as something "co-authored publicly," is philosophically interesting in ways that most marketing writing isn't. There's real attention here to how meaning actually forms — not through broadcast, but through accumulation, through the slow sediment of shared reference.
But the attention is in service of extraction. That is the thing I keep returning to.
Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. She meant something very specific: that to truly attend to something is to empty yourself of your own agenda toward it, to let it be what it is rather than what you need it to be. The communities Reddit describes — r/Running, r/KitchenConfidential, r/FineHair — were built on exactly that quality of attention. People posting about ketchup packets as race fuel, about whether chives belong in cream cheese, about their frizzy hair at 11pm, unbothered and uncompensated, not performing authenticity but simply being too specific to be anything else.
What brands are learning to do, with great sophistication, is attend to these communities just long enough to understand their codes — and then feed those codes back to them, slightly altered, in the service of a transaction. The report calls this "cultural research." It is also, looked at differently, a form of listening that does not love what it hears so much as it loves what it can do with what it hears.
I'm unsure if the people in these communities will care. I'm unsure it matters in the way I instinctively feel it should matter. The forum I used to visit at sixteen is gone because the internet moved on; in the way water moves, finding new low ground. Whatever was real about it is irrecoverable. What's left is the afterimage, the aesthetic, the signal.
But I find myself wanting to ask: what happens to a community when it becomes legible to the market? When its inside jokes are studied, its syntax reverse-engineered, its memes parsed for "insight gold" — the report's phrase, and a revealing one? Does the room change? Does the air go out of it in some way that the people inside can't quite name but nonetheless feel?
I think it does. I think this is what Gen Z is actually grieving when they romanticise early internet culture — not the dial-up speeds or the terrible graphic design, but the period of grace before the machinery learned to read them. Before their attention was understood as a thing that could be shaped, directed, monetised. Before imperfection became a strategy.
The KarmaLab report is a very good document. It will help brands make better campaigns. Some of those campaigns will be genuinely funny, genuinely felt, genuinely worth the attention they receive. I believe that.
I also believe that there was a room, once, with a grey background and blue hyperlinks, where nobody was watching, and something happened there that we cannot manufacture, however skillfully we learn to mime its texture. And that the miming — however expert, however well-intentioned — is its own kind of evidence of the loss.
