I Read it on Reddit
I scroll down a thread about a terrible Facebook meme to find an argument already in progress.
“Real talk though: Has anyone ever actually heard someone say ‘DiD yOu AsSuMe My GeNdEr?!?!?’ unironically?” Asks a user named CheesecakeRaccoon (+139 karma).
“Yes. Have you seen the crazies on college campuses?” Replies a user named TwoDimensionalCube83 (-63 karma). Reddit Enhancement Suite tells me I marked him as “MORON” two years ago. My mass tagger flashes an angry red sign next to his name that tells me he’s very active in the /r/Conservative subreddit.
Gee. You don’t say.
“Motherf***** I’ve gone to art school in Atlanta with gender neutral bathrooms and I’ve never heard anything remotely close to that,” I say. “Y’all just make shit up to be angry about.” (+5 karma).
I can’t see or hear him — it’s almost always male users spewing this nonsense — and I don’t know his name, age, profession, or any other details that his post history doesn’t reveal, but I know enough about him to predict exactly what’s going to happen next. This isn’t my first rodeo.
“You must want your college paid for to even though you got a useless degree and are brainwashed.” TwoDimensionalCube83 replies (-3 karma).
I can’t help but smile. I like being right as much as I detest people like him. Users like him specialize in offense and being offensive. Users like him value cogent ideas and rhetorical consistency only inasmuch as it helps them “own the libs,” and will change the subject in an instant when their line of attack falters.
TwoDimensionalCube83 is hardly unique among redditors. I’ve encountered hundreds like him on reddit since I first signed up. I’ve argued with countless hardline trump supporters, racists (but I repeat myself), misogynists, transphobes and every other flavor of bigot over the years. I’ve watched as overtly racist subreddits have sprouted up and gotten banned. I witnessed the beginning of the incel movement, the banning of the fatpeoplehate subreddit — even the rise and deservedly unceremonious killing of the cryptofascist frenworld subreddit where neo-nazis spread their ideology “disguised” as baby talk (seriously). All on reddit. Which begs the question:
Why am I still using reddit?
It started on one of those gloomy days when the rain’s soporific pitter-patter on the class trailer’s roof turned eyelids to lead and made the period stretch from hour to infinity, one of those afternoons when the sun was content to sit under thin gray blankets and leave the Earth to its own devices. This was back when the world was young, you understand, back in the way back when, back when having an iPhone was the peak of luxury and Facebook was still cool.
It was the winter of 2007, and I was bored.
One of the other students in my newspaper class recommended I check out a site called reddit.com, so I typed the address into Internet Explorer on one of the class’s huge gray computers. The first thing I noticed was the site’s almost embarrassingly minimalistic design. Websites were flashy, colorful things even back then, yet reddit was content to display nothing but a list of blue links on a blank white background while proclaiming itself “the front page of the internet.” I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow as I scrolled down. There were links for news, funny images that would later be called “memes,” pictures of cats and even links to a newfangled video site called YouTube.
Content on reddit was posted by users in disparate communities called “subreddits,” and other users showed their appreciation or discontent for each link by “upvoting” or “downvoting” them, respectively. Content that did especially well would automatically find its way out of its initial subreddit and onto the front page of the site, where users from around the world would interject with their own upvotes, downvotes and comments. Users who post content and comments that the community likes are rewarded with “karma,” meaningless internet points that are nonetheless a major source of pride for many. The site’s underlying logic has remained largely unchanged over the last 15 years.
My first username was eagles189 (my high school’s mascot was an Eagle, and I was trying to wrestle in the 189 weight class), but you won’t find it on reddit. The beauty of reddit’s pseudonymous user system is that you can create multiple usernames with the same email address, or no email address at all, so you can ditch an old persona and adopt a new one whenever you want. This is especially useful when looking back at your post history and realizing what a cringy nerd you used to be — no need to waste time deleting individual posts when you can just nuke the whole thing from orbit.
Eagles189. El_Miscreanto. Alexander_the_Decent. Fuzzy_Lil_Man_Peach. Genghis_Maybe. PM_Me_500_Dollars. All outgrown or oversaturated in youthful cringe, all shed and forgotten like digital snakeskin. I’ve grown a lot in the last 15 years, and so has reddit.
Reddit started back in 2005 as a niche content aggregator that primarily catered to programmers and other techies, but it didn’t take long for the site to start growing. The site was seeing over 46 million monthly users by the time 2012 rolled around, a number that’s almost quaint compared to the 430 million monthly users it recorded in 2019. Users were allowed to create their own subreddits in 2008, a privilege that saw the creation of some 3.45 million subreddits by 2022. Most of those subreddits are defunct — reddit itself claims over 100,000 active communities existed as of 2021 — but those communities are active enough to generate over 366 million posts and 2.3 billion comments in 2021 alone.
In other words: reddit is big.
“Reddit is still somewhere in the middle of that idealised vision of the web as a community, free and open source space vs walled garden/ techno-feudalism. It’s not perfect by any means but it’s definitely more messy,” says Martin Potter, a researcher at Deakin University.
Discussing reddit can be a challenge. The site is so big and its content so varied that it defies categorization and makes it all but impossible to assign it a simple “good” or “bad” value. Make no mistake, all the bad things you may have heard about reddit are probably true. It has and continues to be home to some of the worst, most hateful communities around, some of which I won’t even mention due to their explicitly racist and bigoted names. Reddit’s r/the_donald subreddit was the epicenter of the trump fandom in 2016, a fact that was readily apparent to all users at the time thanks to the tactics they used to manipulate the algorithm to dominate the site. It was also home to the objectively reprehensible r/jailbait subreddit (exactly what it sounds like) which stayed up until 2011 and was only banned because of media scrutiny.
But for all the objectionable content and comments that inhabit reddit’s gross underbelly, the site is and has been home to some of the kindest, generous and funniest communities on the internet. Redditors were moved by the tale of a dying girl being harassed by a neighbor and paid for a special toy shopping spree complete with stretch limo, red carpet and police escort. It hosted years of Secret Santa exchanges that included participants like Bill Gates and Snoop Dogg, helped a hot sauce business get off the ground, led the (successful) search for a lost parrot, correctly diagnosed a man’s testicular cancer via a pregnancy test, figured out that a user was suffering carbon monoxide poisoning, flooded a 2-year-old with birthday cards when COVID canceled her party and a long list of other spontaneous acts of kindness and charity that have reached people around the world.
As wonderful as all that charity and kindness is, however, the greatest service that redditors bring to the world is their humor. There’s the story of Kevin, the dumbest person alive. A tale of flatulent revenge against irritating children. A thread asking what tragedy burdened the owners of PT Cruisers with their terrible cars. Commentors making terrible crowdsourced pickup lines. Stories about pretending not to know what a potato is and a lazy naval officer abusing his power. Complaints about stupid long horses, inappropriate jokes about OP’s departed wife and too many other examples to list. I could literally do this all day.
On top of all that silly business, reddit is also home to some of the most informative and helpful communities on the web. There are subreddits for tech support, for fans of fountain pens, for people who love knitting, approximately one million cat-related subreddits, subreddits for Atlanta the city and the show and literally tens of thousands of other communities. Want to know if Louis XIV left his wig on before getting with his mistress? /r/Askhistorians has you covered. Need recommendations for a new graphics card? Ask /r/BuildaPC. Like cars? Check out /r/cars. Bars? /r/Bar. Mars? /r/Space.
My point is that reddit is much more than its reputation. There are plenty of jerks and bigots, sure, but there are also millions of nice, funny people who post content and comments out of love, not hate, and they vastly outnumber the bastards slinking around the site. And if you do it right, you can spend hour after hour on the site without running into a single TwoDimensionalCube83 or bigots of any flavor.
The truth is that reddit is exactly as wonderful or terrible as you make it. You can stick to the regular front pages of /r/All and /r/Popular and never leave the default subreddits, sure, but that’ll vastly limit your experience. If you’re going to check out reddit — and you should — you’ll be much better off if you create your own username and make your own personal reddit. It’s easier than it sounds.
Once you’re signed up you’ll be able to subscribe and unsubscribe from subreddits. This is a lot more significant than you’d think. Every user has their own personal front page filled with content from the subreddits they subscribe to and only the subreddits they subscribe to. You can unsubscribe from all the default subreddits and join every last knitting-related subreddit out there, then enjoy a front page full of yarn and free of toxic nonsense. You can turn your front page into a nonstop parade of adorable cats, a never ending feed of fresh memes, a curated news source or just about anything else you can imagine. If you like something, there’s a subreddit for it. All you have to do is subscribe.
“My feed is actually pretty positive overall, but that’s because I’ve curated it to be more positive. When I’m not doing research on the place, I almost never even see the bad side of Reddit,” agrees Dr. Ryan Shepherd, a professor at Ohio University and author of “Gaming Reddit’s Algorithm: r/the_donald, Amplification, and the Rhetoric of Sorting.”
My personal reddit has evolved over the years as I’ve gotten older and my interests have changed. I like to balance out my diet of politics, news and arguments with trumpy morons with webcomics, gaming news, cats who yell, forums for talking to fellow freelancers and several other topics that are safe for work but too embarrassing for me to share with you. I get in arguments with people like TwoDimensionalCube83 because I want to, not because I have to. Dunking on bigots is fun, for one, and it lets me relieve some aggression while simultaneously letting them know their hatred is both unfounded and unwelcome.
So if you’ve never been on reddit because you’ve heard bad things about it or because you think it’s scary or full of misogynists, racists and Republicans, I urge you to reconsider. Reddit is just another microcosm of the internet; full of good, bad and everything in between.
