Reddit (website)

Reddit is a social networking and news aggregator website that allows registered users, or redditors, to post and discuss all manner of content. Posts are organized in groups called communities (or subreddits) that are themselves created and in part moderated by users. Members can vote posts up or down, with the most popular content gaining extra visibility. The site’s name is a play on the words "read it."

Reddit was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The site was soon acquired by the media conglomerate Condé Nast, and was spun off as an independent subsidiary in 2011. Reddit grew rapidly through the 2010s and into the 2020s, becoming one of the most-visited websites in the world. By early 2024, when the company went public, Reddit reported more than 73 million daily active users across more than 100,000 active communities. The site's format and social impact have earned both acclaim and controversy.

History of Reddit

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian first met while studying at the University of Virginia. During their senior year, in 2005, they met the influential programmer Paul Graham and were invited to apply to a startup incubator program he was launching, called Y Combinator. Huffman and Ohanian's first startup idea, for a system to order food through text messaging, was not accepted. However, they soon came up with another proposal: a website that would make it easier for internet users to sift through the vast amount of news and information available online. This concept of a "front page of the internet" won funding from Y Combinator, and Huffman and Ohanian debuted their site, Reddit, in June 2005.

Reddit was developed to allow users to post virtually any kind of content. Other users could then give posts an upvote or downvote, and the most popular content would be displayed more prominently. Users who continually posted popular content built up "karma" points, giving them higher credibility among Reddit users, while the opposite effect befell unpopular posters. The ability to comment on posts was soon added and became a key feature.

When the site first launched, Huffman and Ohanian posted content under fabricated accounts to attract internet traffic. The site eventually gained enough momentum to interest outside investments. Reddit merged with a company called Infogami in January 2006. Infogami was headed by Aaron Swartz, who received a portion of Reddit’s ownership and helped rewrite much of the site's code. Over the next few months, Reddit quickly grew in popularity, reaching five hundred thousand daily viewers. This attracted much industry attention, and the publishing company Condé Nast purchased the site for a reported $20 million in October 2006 and moved its headquarters to San Francisco.

Swartz was fired shortly after the acquisition, in early 2007. Ohanian and Huffman both left the company in 2009 to pursue other ventures. Reddit added many new team members in the following years. It also introduced new site features as traffic continued to grow. In July 2010, the Reddit team launched Reddit Gold (later known as Reddit Premium), a subscription membership that gave paying users access to more site features. By 2011, Reddit had accumulated more than one billion monthly page views and boasted more than eighty million users. That year, Condé Nast spun Reddit out as an independent operation, with both entities remaining under parent company Advance Publications.

Reddit continued to grow dramatically, rising from five billion total views in 2013 to eighty-two billion total views in 2015. The site’s popularity garnered it multiple high-profile investors, including venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen as well as celebrities Snoop Dogg and Jared Leto. The site continued to launch new features and content, including a podcast, newsletter, and its own web-based editorial publication known as Upvoted, which allows users to write and upload original stories, videos, art, and podcasts. Reddit also engaged in a number of philanthropic efforts and played an active part in raising money for several charities over the years.

Despite its steady growth, Reddit faced considerable internal turmoil during this period. Leadership positions saw considerable turnover, in part due to the site's deepening reputation for offensive content and toxic behavior and the company's struggles to moderate its sprawling platform. Technical issues and workplace controversies also contributed to the mounting challenges. Ohanian rejoined Reddit as executive chair in late 2014, and Huffman returned as CEO in 2015. They helped oversee ongoing and new improvement efforts, including stricter moderation policies and the launch of the Reddit mobile app. A major redesign of the site was released in April 2018. These changes were largely successful in stabilizing the company, but Reddit remained significantly smaller than other prominent social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter (later known as X) in terms of both daily active users and revenues.

Ohanian left Reddit again in 2020, resigning his board position as a gesture of support for the wave of racial justice protests that year. In 2021, Reddit filed plans for an initial public offering (IPO). After numerous delays, the company's stock market debut finally took place in March 2024. The IPO generated much attention in the business world, with Reddit's share price leaping 48 percent in their first day of trading.

Site Details

Users register with Reddit under a unique username, all of which begin with the prefix "u/" but otherwise may be chosen as available or randomly generated. The website itself is made up of numerous user-generated forums, known as communities or subreddits, that are designated by the prefix "r/." These groups are based on a common theme—which may be very broad, such as "r/pics" for images of any kind, or very narrow, such as a community dedicated to discussion of an obscure novel. Subreddits may be open to any registered user or require approval to join.

Once a user has joined a Reddit community, they can post within the group and comment on other users' posts. Content may be original or sourced from elsewhere on the internet. Users can then "upvote" or "downvote" a post or comment. Posts with more upvotes get more visibility on the platform, rising to the top of a subreddit page (although users may also filter their view other ways, such as chronologically.) The most popular posts across the entire site in a given period may also appear on the main Reddit page. Within each individual post, the most popular comment rises to show up directly beneath the initial post.

Originally, Reddit did very little to moderate content across its many forums. Company officials often suggested that anything legal would be tolerated on the site in the name of free speech. However, by the mid-2010s Reddit's reputation for hate speech, misinformation, pornography, and other controversial material led the company to establish stricter rules. Subreddits are largely moderated by user volunteers, and specific rules about posting can vary between communities. Paid Reddit administrators conduct additional moderation as needed, including banning entire subreddits that consistently violate site policies.

Certain subreddits have proven especially popular and influential on the site's overall culture. One example is r/IAmA, which translates to "I am a." Posts in this community usually begin with "IAmA" followed by whatever the poster claims to be, such as an expert in a certain field. The r/IAmA subreddit helped popularize the AMA ("Ask Me Anything") format, in which users make a post inviting others to comment with any manner of questions to ask them, and the original poster then responds to the questions in the same thread. Many professionals and celebrities held AMAs on r/IAmA over the years, including President Barack Obama, pop star Madonna, and entrepreneur Bill Gates, among many other well-known names.

Reddit has also introduced various other features over the years, such as private messaging. Users can create customized avatars to represent their profile.

Advertising is a primary revenue stream for Reddit. Paid ads appear as "promoted" posts across the site. Revenue also comes through paid subscriptions, which offer an ad-free user experience among other premium features.

Controversies and Scandals

Like many popular social media sites, Reddit faced numerous controversies over the years. In general, the site consistently grappled with balancing user freedom against suppression of offensive or dangerous content. Early on, Reddit generally granted users wide leeway in creating and managing communities, subject only to basic sitewide policies and legal restrictions. This led to a proliferation of controversial subreddits, including groups promoting racism and other hate speech, violent imagery, and exploitative sexually explicit or suggestive material. Later, Reddit embraced a stricter approach to content moderation, but critics continued to frequently express concerns.

Some specific incidents gained particular negative attention in the mainstream media, especially when conduct on Reddit led to clear consequences in the real world. For instance, certain parts of the Reddit community earned scrutiny for failed attempts at internet vigilantism. An infamous example of Reddit’s sometimes-dangerous influence involved the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Redditors misidentified several people as possible suspects, leading to massive witch hunts against innocent people. Another common complaint involved the use of Reddit to spread nonconsensual sexual imagery, including possible child pornography and so-called revenge porn. This issue attracted widespread media attention in 2014 as part of a broader scandal involving the leak of numerous celebrity nude photos.

Such incidents compelled Reddit to censor or ban user-posted content at times. In 2015, after Huffman returned to the company as CEO, he spearheaded a wider ban on many notorious racist and exploitative subreddits. Reddit maintained a heightened approach to content moderation over the following years. According to many industry observers, this helped gradually improve the site's overall public image.

However, such self-imposed censorship generated backlash from some redditors. Notably, some complained that the company, and Huffman specifically, was unfairly suppressing right-wing viewpoints. Accusations of political bias increased with the 2016 US presidential election and subsequent administration of Republican president Donald Trump, as Reddit made several high-profile attempts to crack down on misinformation posted by alt-right figures and other Trump supporters. At the same time, some observers criticized Reddit as remaining too lenient against misinformation (right-wing or otherwise), including examples of false medical advice and other potentially harmful information. As on other social media platforms, misinformation around the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election on Reddit earned a great deal of attention.

In January 2021, Reddit drew nationwide attention when one of its subreddits had a very real impact in the financial world. Members of the stock trading–oriented subreddit r/WallStreetBets used the platform to orchestrate a short squeeze, dramatically driving up the share price of the company GameStop, which many investors, including several large hedge funds, had bet on falling. The GameStop short squeeze proved so influential that some brokerage firms paused or limited purchases, and the fallout triggered US government investigation for potentially inappropriate market manipulation.

Reddit faced another controversy in 2023 after announcing significant business model changes, particular involving pricing of its application programming interface (API). Many users criticized the move, suggesting it would destroy many popular third-party apps for browsing and moderating subreddits. Thousands of subreddit moderators protested by temporarily changing their communities' access settings to private, posting only memes, or through other measures.

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