What's the deal with Reddit?

Also: why is The Athletic's UX so bad?

Are you a high functioning adult?

Chances are, if you’re smart enough to be subscribed to this excellent newsletter, the answer is “Yes!”. And if the answer is in the affirmative then it stands to reason that you may not really know what Reddit is. In fact, your knowledge of Reddit might be contained to fringe, slightly scary, stories about, at best, a gang of web investors disrupting the short selling of Game Stop, or, at worst, the sort of extreme right-wing discourse that led to the Capitol insurrection in 2021.

The reality is that neither of those incidents paints a particularly useful portrait of a website as broad as Reddit. Reddit is almost unique in the way it functions as publisher, aggregator and social media (Facebook does the same thing, I suppose, but with a focus on smaller groups, rather than public dissemination). But what Reddit has, that Facebook conspicuously lacks, is an anarchic sense of the users being in control. The inmates running the asylum.

Forgive the history lesson: Reddit was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman, Aaron Swartz and Alexis Ohanian. Huffman, known as spez, is still around, working as the site’s CEO and doing battle with their endless content moderation issues. Ohanian is now perhaps better known as Serena Williams’ other half, and left day-to-day work as a Reddit board member in 2020. Swartz took his own life in 2013 following federal charges for pirating the online academic journal JSTOR (a tragic story told in Brian Knappenberger’s documentary The Internet’s Own Boy, which is well worth watching).

Structurally, Reddit owes a lot to the early days of internet forums, which were the default social media when I was growing up, for people who wanted to engage in specialised chat with strangers. And that’s the key thing to understand about Reddit. Facebook (originally at least) sought to replicate Real World social interactions in an online space – literally, a digital face book (we’ve all seen The Social Network). Reddit is, to some extent, the opposite. It is about facilitating the conversations that the Real World lacks. If I’m obsessed with perfumes or the movies of James Cameron or famous women’s feet, it would be a challenge for me to find kinship amongst my regular social interactions. But there’s a space for everyone on the internet.

And so Reddit is divided into sub-Reddits, covering all sorts of topics. The biggest ones have millions of users (/r/announcements leads the way with 150m+, but /r/funny is perhaps the highest ranking non-default option with 41m) and the smallest have nobody but the creator. The content posted varies from sub to sub, sometimes just images or videos or links, at other times lengthy text posts. Engagement comes in the form of upvoting and downvoting, which dictates how prominently placed the content is on the subreddit’s page (and whether it might make the coveted Homepage slot), and comments, which often go thousands deep. It is more culturally obsessive than any other social media site (except, perhaps, Twitter). To be a serious Redditor is a lifestyle choice in a way at users of Facebook or Instagram or TikTok would not understand.