Reddit has just closed a $50 million round of outside funding

Reddit has raised $50 million in a round of outside funding which will allow it to hire more staff, expand its community management team and more.

Speaking in a blog post on the site, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong said investors are also looking into ways in which the can community own shares - something the founders have been wanting to do for quite a while.

"The investors in this round have proposed to give 10% of their shares back to the community, in recognition of the central role the community plays in reddit's ongoing success," said Wong. "We're going to need to figure out a bunch of details to make it work, but we're hopeful.

"We'll have more specifics to share about it soon, but in the meantime we wanted to mention it."

Funding will also go into helping expand Reddit's mobile offerings and the aforementioned staff expansion.

"We're planning to use this money to hire more staff for product development, expand our community management team, build out better moderation and community tools," Wong continued.

"[We'll also] work more closely with third party developers to expand our mobile offerings, improve our self-serve ad product, build out redditgifts marketplace, pay for our growing technical infrastructure, and all the many other things it takes to support a huge and growing global internet community."

The lead funding investor was Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator - a company which helps startups. Altman also helped launch Reddit.

Along with other financial backers, outside contributors included Wong as well as Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg among others.