How Databricks Transformed a Private Subreddit Into a Powerful Community Engine

Most enterprise brands shy away from Reddit. They either ignore their own subreddits or let anonymous moderators run them, missing out on unfiltered conversations from their most technical users and leaving their reputation to the whims of strangers.

Databricks took a different path. 

Instead of leaving r/databricks locked behind closed doors, they reclaimed ownership, opened the gates, and built intentional guardrails to shape the community’s direction.

It may look like a simple relaunch, but it’s actually a strategic move. Databricks turned Reddit into a multidepartment growth engine. They combined experienced moderators with employee voices and trusted advocates to create a space where practitioners troubleshoot, prospects share buying objections, and customers deliver product feedback in real time. 

Today, the subreddit generates 10,000+ organic visits a month, ranks for hundreds of high-intent keywords, and acts as a direct pipeline of insights for product, marketing, and customer success teams.

Their journey from reclaiming an abandoned subreddit to building a powerful feedback engine is a masterclass in community-driven growth that every enterprise brand should study.

So how did they do it? That’s what you’re about to find out.  

Owning the Conversation: Why Big Brands Should Control Their Subreddits

With how popular the platform is becoming, particularly among tech users and knowledge workers, it’s not surprising that more enterprise brands want to maintain control over their presence on Reddit.

The question is: How do you go about it?

Sometimes you need to build a branded subreddit from scratch, unless one already exists. 

Branded subreddits aren’t always run by the brand. Just take a look at the following companies that don’t run their subreddits: 

• OpenAI
• Salesforce
• LastPass

Despite 74% of people stating that Reddit helps them make faster purchase decisions, big companies like these are leaving key decision-making steps to a group of anonymous users. 

Why?

Sometimes brands find the “messiness” of Reddit a challenge and shy away from it. Or they may be unaware that anonymous individuals are running their branded Reddit community. And in some cases, like r/OpenAI, the community simply becomes too big and unruly to manage effectively. 

For r/databricks, it turns out the subreddit was initially set up as a private community in 2021, which means Redditors needed moderator approval to view, join, and participate in the discussions. So, all the valuable conversations about the brand and product were happening behind closed doors. 

Since the subreddit had become inactive, u/lothorp, an anonymous Databricks employee, requested ownership of r/databricks from Reddit administrators to open up the community for public discussion. 

This process involves posting in the subreddit r/redditquest, a subreddit where users request moderator access to unused communities or replace inactive top moderators. 

Once a request is reviewed, a Reddit admin will ask for a detailed outline of your plans with the subreddit and for you to send a message to the subreddit you want to take over.

After taking over and launching the subreddit, the new r/databricks moderators spread the word across relevant communities, including r/dataengineering, r/apachespark, and r/SQL.  

Since then, they’ve set up their public subreddit as a community-driven channel where users of all skill sets interact with each other and Databricks employees. It’s an approach that aligns closely with the strategy we propose in our Reddit guide for brands. 

Now let’s take a closer look. 

How Databrinks Runs An Enterprise-Level Subreddit

The Databricks subreddit now counts 20,000 members and roughly 450 weekly contributions — Reddit’s metric for posts and comments that stick after moderation.

Instead of overengineering flair and categories, the moderators keep it simple: Megathread, Discussions, General, Help, News, Events, and Tutorials. This light-touch structure keeps conversations open while still making it easy to navigate. 

By contrast, brands like 1Password segment flairs by product and feature, showing that there’s no single “right way,”  only what fits your community. 

Databricks also uses Reddit’s related communities feature to connect users with developer-centric spaces like r/dataengineering, r/apachespark, and r/SQL. 

This move does double duty: it positions Databricks as user-first and non-promotional, while still giving employees access to customer feedback wherever the conversation happens.

Subreddits are topic-based communities, so moderators typically establish rules that prevent conversations from straying too far outside the confines of that topic. Still, the groups are constantly growing and evolving, so it’s natural that tangential topics surface. 

Containing Popular Topics with Megathreads

To prevent tangential discussions from flooding the feed, the moderators lean on megathreads. These pinned posts funnel recurring conversations into focused hubs, without shutting them down outright.

Currently, two megathreads dominate: 

1) Hiring and Interview:  A 6-month-old thread for people to discuss Databricks hiring and interview experiences, “without interrupting the community’s main focus on practitioners and advice about the Databricks platform itself”. 

2) Certifications and Training: A recurring thread that the Databricks moderators use to contain discussions about certifications and training programs the brand offers to help end-users get more out of the various products. 

The strategy here is clear: redirect without silencing, and keep practitioners front and center.

That same balance — light structure with strong intent — also defines how Databricks manages who runs the community. Their approach to moderation and advocacy shows why trust is just as important as traffic.

Building Community Through Trust and Advocacy

Databricks strikes a balance between moderation for employees and external advocates, achieving the credibility that most brands often miss.

Databricks Moderators

Two long-time Redditors (u/lothorp and u/kthejoker) run the sub alongside Holly Smith (u/datasmithing_holly) from the Databricks Developer Relations team. Between them, they bring nearly 30 years of Reddit experience, which is helping them make the most of a platform famously skeptical of brands.

Just take a look at how u/kthejoker navigated this highly-upvoted comment from a Redditor voicing their concerns about an all-employee mod team when they first announced the subreddit relaunch. 

Databricks Employees

Unlike many brands that keep employees at arm’s length from Reddit, Databricks puts its technical staff directly into the conversation. Solutions architect Youssef Mrini (u/Youssef_Mrin) and and product managers posting under handles like u/BricksterInTheWall and u/saad-the-engineer answer questions, share product context, and clarify roadmaps in real time.

This is a risky but strategic choice. Employee participation gives the community credible, authoritative voices and shows that Databricks takes user feedback seriously. It also means customers can bypass generic marketing copy and get direct input from the people who design and sell the product.

Not all companies take this approach. There are also semi-official approaches to Reddit, like Mint Mobile’s, where moderators are not their employees, but brand representatives participate in the subreddit. 

Databricks Advocates

More recently, Databricks advocates and Industry MVPs Hubert Dudek (u/hubert-dudek) and Josue Bogran (u/JosueBogran), with 20k+ LinkedIn followers each, have entered the picture. These are industry professionals with extensive experience using Databricks products who can help other users with troubleshooting and demonstrate best practices. 

This mix of anonymity, employee visibility, and external advocacy makes the community feel authentic while still feeding Databricks’ internal teams actionable insights.

How r/databricks Provides Value Across the Entire Ecosystem

A lot of conversations surrounding Reddit center on its SERP dominance and impact on AI mentions and citations. And understandably so; r/databricks currently appears in a top-3 SERP position for over 300 keywords, resulting in more than 10,000 organic visits every month. 

While it’s a critical channel for search engine and generative engine optimization, Reddit has been a valuable channel for businesses since well before the AI boom. 

(There’s a reason Ross was talking about Reddit as a business play all the way back in 2018.) 

Its topic-based forum-style setup makes it perfect for brands to tap into in-depth discussions on what customers love and hate. That translates to value for multiple departments. 

Product Teams: A Pipeline of Feedback

Some of the most valuable information you can get on Reddit comes in the form of negative feedback about your product (as long as it’s constructive). Redditors don’t hold back, so it’s the perfect place to find out how your product or service doesn’t meet user needs. This is a gold mine for improvement across all departments — Sales, Product, Marketing, and Customer Support. 

Complaints about Databricks’ “laggy” UI sparked 29 comments, many reinforcing the same pain points. 

The top comment contains some truly valuable advice about how important addressing these UI performance issues is for Databrick’s long-term success: “They easily have the best data tool on the market but the BS with the UI may ruin them.”

Another thread on trial experience generated 100+ responses with specifics like cluster spin-up times, CI/CD workflow gaps, and outdated authentication. 

That’s the type of question that product-led teams are constantly asking themselves. How can we improve our free–tier product or trial experience for new users so they convert into paid ones? 

The thread now has a running log of validated product feedback, with Developer Relations staff like Holly distilling key points for internal teams.

A word of caution: Your Reddit strategy needs to have cross-department alignment. Promising product improvements or new features without full confirmation that they’re in the pipeline on the product side is an easy way to create negative sentiment on Reddit. 

Sales and Customer Support: Crowdsourced Retention

Another benefit of having a branded subreddit is it can function as a customer enablement and retention channel. The approaches that 1Password and Tailscale take on Reddit are great examples of this.

When product evangelists, power users, and newbies come together in the same space, the expert users and product MVPs share their tips and tricks on how to get the most out of the platform. 

For instance, a data architect from a Fortune 1000 company recently asked whether other users are able to cut Databricks costs, outlining the methods they’ve used, and talking about how they’re “starting to dread any further meetings with the FinOps team” (great language for the marketing team to use, btw). 

The comment contains nearly a dozen different threads full of high-upvote, validated suggestions on various ways this user can reduce costs and alleviate pressure from the finance team. The OP gets helpful advice, other users get to swap tips, and Databricks gets a more satisfied enterprise customer without even getting their customer support team involved. 

Everybody in the Databricks community wins.

Marketing: Content Feedback Loops

Using Reddit as a marketing channel is harder than it seems. Content that ranks well in the SERPs and generates clicks can get shredded in a subreddit. Often because it doesn’t provide much value to the reader.

Many brands view Reddit as a distribution channel (which it can be), but it’s also highly effective as a tool for optimizing your content. The platform doubles as a testing ground for content-market fit, from your brand messaging to technical documentation. 

Databricks is using this very process to improve their data engineering documentation. A post from u/BricksterInTheWall is a great example of a modified content supply chain: 

• Users highlight issues with documentation quality and accessibility
• Employees on Reddit collect and deliver the feedback to the necessary teams
• Internal teams update and improve the documentation based on user feedback
• Employees redeliver the documentation for review by end users
• Rinse and repeat

The level of detail in the data engineering documentation thread is a product marketer’s dream come true.

The r/databricks community demonstrates how a single platform can deliver compound value across an entire organization. 

Product teams mining user feedback, marketing teams refining their messaging, customer success reducing support tickets through peer-to-peer assistance, sales teams understanding objections firsthand – their subreddit creates a virtuous cycle of insights and engagement. 

This multidepartmental value generation proves that having a Reddit community isn’t just another marketing trick but a strategic asset for modern enterprise brands.

Turn Your Reddit Community into a Competitive Advantage

r/databricks is the perfect example of how a thoughtful approach to community marketing and management on Reddit drives results across multiple business departments. 

And it all starts with planting your brand flag and creating a community. 

Whether you’re looking to reclaim an existing subreddit or build one from scratch, the time to establish your Reddit presence is now. The benefits extend far beyond search traffic and AI mentions. You’re creating a direct line to your most engaged users and a feedback loop that strengthens your entire business.

Want to tap into the potential of having a Reddit community? Get in touch with the original Reddit marketing agency for B2B and start building a Reddit strategy that benefits your entire company.