Meta's New App Wants to Be Reddit

You already know the behaviour, even if you've never consciously named it. You're about to buy something — a probiotic, a sewing machine, a coffee grinder that costs more than your first car — and right before you commit, you open a new tab, type the product name, and add one word: Reddit.

Not the brand's website. Not Amazon reviews (half of which read like they were written by the manufacturer's cousin). Reddit. Because you want the opinion of someone who actually used the thing and has no financial incentive to lie about it.

This behaviour has become so commercially significant that Google pays Reddit $60 million a year to license its content for AI training and search results. It is, in structural terms, one of the most important layers of the modern purchase funnel — the pre-purchase validation phase — and it has been largely outside the control of any single advertising platform.

Meta would like to change that. And the way they're going about it is genuinely fascinating.

Meet Forum (Yes, That's Really the Name)

Meta has quietly released a standalone app called Forum, built on top of Facebook Groups, that positions itself as a direct competitor to this exact use case. The app includes an AI-powered "Ask" tab that synthesises answers from group discussions across Facebook — functioning as a community-sourced answer engine.

Think of it as Reddit plus Google's AI Overviews, built inside the most sophisticated advertising infrastructure on the internet.

To be clear: Forum is not a new social network. It's a dedicated interface for Facebook Groups — the same groups that already exist within the main Facebook app — with a conversational AI layer bolted on top. Users sign in with their Facebook account, Forum loads their existing groups and activity, and posts made in Forum appear in the same groups on Facebook. Nothing moves. It just gets a new front door. (A front door that happens to have a very attentive AI doorman.)

This is Meta's second attempt at a standalone Groups app. The first, launched in 2014, was designed to make cross-group sharing easier but got quietly killed in 2017. That version had no AI capability and no particular thesis about what problem it was solving. Forum is different in one important respect: it has a clear use case — the structured retrieval of community knowledge — and AI is the mechanism that makes it viable.

Why the "Reddit Query" Is Worth Fighting Over

The behaviour Forum targets sits at a specific and commercially significant point in the purchase journey. It occurs after initial discovery — the consumer already knows the product exists — but before conversion. It's the moment of peer validation, and it has historically been difficult for platforms to monetise because it depends on trust. And trust, as every ecommerce operator knows, is extraordinarily difficult to manufacture.

Reddit has understood this for some time and has been moving to commercialise it. The platform's AI-powered search tool, Reddit Answers, grew from one million weekly active users in Q1 2025 to fifteen million by Q4. Weekly active search users overall grew 30% year-on-year, reaching 80 million. Reddit also began testing an AI shopping feature that matches organically recommended products from community discussions with shoppable listings from retail partners — product carousels with pricing, images, and direct purchase links at the bottom of search results.

Reddit's advantage is that its recommendations are perceived as authentic precisely because the platform is not optimised for selling. The challenge is that monetising that trust without eroding it is extraordinarily difficult.

Forum represents Meta's bet that it can skip that tension entirely. Rather than building trust from scratch, Meta is leveraging the community discussions that already happen in Facebook Groups — groups dedicated to supplements, sewing, fitness, parenting, home renovation, specific product categories, and thousands of other niches — and surfacing them through an AI interface that makes them searchable and actionable.

Community Data Inside the Death Star

Here's where it gets genuinely fascinating. The critical difference between Forum and Reddit is not the app itself. It's what sits behind it.

Reddit's commerce monetisation remains nascent. The company launched its first shoppable ad product, Dynamic Product Ads, only last year. Its ad revenue is growing — seven consecutive quarters above 60% — but its targeting infrastructure is still being built. Reddit knows what communities users belong to and what topics they discuss, but its identity graph is thin by design. Pseudonymity is a feature, not a bug, and it constrains the precision of ad targeting.

Meta operates in the inverse configuration. Its advertising infrastructure is the most mature in digital commerce: Advantage+ automates creative optimisation and audience targeting at scale, the Meta Pixel and Conversions API provide detailed purchase attribution, and the company's identity graph spans billions of users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Meta knows who you are, what you've purchased, what you've browsed, and who you're connected to. (Sleep well tonight.)

When a consumer asks "has anyone tried this protein powder?" inside Forum, that query is not just a question. It's an intent signal — a commercially actionable data point that can inform ad targeting, feed recommendation models, and enrich the signal layer that Advantage+ uses to optimise campaign delivery. Forum conversations aren't just content. They're training data for a commerce engine.

This is the structural play that matters more than whether Forum succeeds as a consumer product. The AI synthesis layer doesn't just help consumers find answers. It helps Meta categorise, structure, and operationalise purchasing intelligence that has been sitting inside Groups for years, largely untapped.

The Honesty Problem (Or: Why Anonymity Matters More Than You Think)

There is, however, a tension at the core of this strategy that Meta hasn't resolved — and may not be able to.

Reddit's value in the purchase journey derives from pseudonymous candour. People say what they actually think about a product because their name, their employer, and their social graph are not attached to the statement. A Reddit user will write that a popular skincare product gave them a rash, that a hyped supplement did nothing, or that a well-reviewed gadget broke after three weeks. They will say this because there is no social cost to honesty.

Forum inherits Facebook's real-name identity framework. Users can post with a nickname, but their profile, group memberships, and social connections are visible. And research on online behaviour has consistently shown that people self-censor more when their identity is known — they're less likely to post negative reviews and more inclined to temper criticism.

For ecommerce, this distinction is not academic. The value of community-sourced product intelligence depends on the honesty of the community. If Forum's identity layer produces recommendations that are more socially filtered and less willing to say "this product is not worth the money," then the signal it generates is less useful for consumers — even as it becomes more useful for Meta's ad models.

Meta gets richer data about who is interested in which product categories. The consumer gets a less trustworthy answer to the question they actually asked. Everybody wins. (Except, you know, the consumer.)

What This Means for Sellers

Facebook Groups already play an underappreciated role in product discovery for certain categories. Supplement brands, craft supplies, beauty products, niche hobby equipment — these are segments where dedicated Facebook Groups function as active communities of buyers who share recommendations, post reviews, and ask for advice. For brands that have cultivated a presence in these groups, Forum represents an amplification of that existing advantage: their products and community endorsements will now be surfaced through an AI synthesis layer that makes group knowledge accessible to users who might never have scrolled through the group itself.

For brands that have ignored Facebook Groups, the calculus shifts. Forum's AI will surface recommendations regardless of whether a brand has participated in the conversation. If competitors are being discussed favourably in relevant groups, that discussion will now be synthesised and served to users who ask the AI for advice. Brands absent from those conversations will be absent from the answers.

And here's where Meta's infrastructure advantage becomes genuinely uncomfortable for anyone selling products online: the distance between "a consumer read a recommendation in Forum" and "Meta served that consumer a retargeting ad for the recommended product in their Instagram feed" is essentially zero. Discovery to retargeting in a single ecosystem. No attribution gaps. No leaky funnel. Just a very efficient machine that happens to know what you were thinking about buying.

The Bottom Line

The pre-purchase research phase — the moment when a consumer seeks peer validation before buying — is being claimed by platforms with AI synthesis capabilities and advertising infrastructure. Reddit is building toward it from the community side. Google is licensing Reddit's content to power AI Overviews. And now Meta is making its own bid, with the advantage of a real-identity graph and the most advanced ad-targeting system in digital commerce.

The "Reddit query" isn't disappearing. But the platforms competing to capture it — and to monetise the intent it represents — are multiplying. For brands, the question is no longer whether community-sourced product intelligence matters to sales. It's whether you're present in the communities where that intelligence is being generated, structured, and served back to the next buyer in line.

P.S. If you've been treating Facebook Groups as a relic of the "your aunt shares minion memes" era, now might be a good time to reconsider. The aunt is still there. But so is the AI reading every product recommendation she's ever made.

P.P.S. Meta building a Reddit competitor on top of Facebook Groups is the corporate equivalent of realising you've been sitting on oil for twenty years and finally buying a drill. The question is whether the oil is actually there, or whether it evaporated the moment people had to use their real names.

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