Product design question

What strategies would you implement to help new Reddit users discover relevant communities quickly?

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Whether the candidate can solve a cold-start discovery problem specific to a community-based platform, not a generic content feed.

Clarify the goal: get new users to find a handful of relevant subreddits quickly enough that their first session feels personally relevant.
Name the pain point: Reddit has tens of thousands of communities, and generic top-communities lists don't reflect individual interests.
Prioritize an onboarding interest-selection flow, similar to what Reddit has tested, where users pick broad topics that map to a curated set of communities.
Add a behavioral signal loop: use early browsing and upvote behavior in the first session to refine community suggestions in real time.
Define success as percent of new users who join 3 or more communities in their first week and 7-day retention for that cohort versus those who don't.

Names the cold-start problem explicitly, since it's the specific, well-known discovery challenge for a community platform like Reddit.
Proposes combining explicit interest selection with implicit behavioral signals, not relying on either alone.
Ties the success metric to early retention lift, showing discovery is a means to retention, not an end in itself.

Proposing a generic search or trending feed without addressing the scale of Reddit's community count.
Measuring only joins without checking whether those joins lead to lasting engagement.

How would you handle a new user whose interests don't map well to existing communities?
What would you do if users join communities during onboarding but never return to them?