Reddit

About

Reddit is a social news aggregation website that ranks content based on a scoring system determined by user votes. Its users are often referred to as "Redditors", and belong to what has been called ''one of the most influential communities on the Internet'' in an article on Voltier.^[1] The site has played a significant role in the spread and creation of Internet memes.

Online History

Reddit was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian when they were both 22-years-old. On June 15th, the site was launched. According to CrunchBase^[2], the site received its original seed funding of $100,000 from startup investment firm Y Combinator. On October 31st, 2006, reddit was acquired by the magazine publishing company Condé Nast.^[3]

Condé Nast Acquisition

On October 31st, 2006, reddit was acquired by the magazine publishing company Condé Nast.^[3] On September 6th, 2011, an announcement posted to the official reddit blog^[4] revealed that the company had become reddit Inc. and was now owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast.

Series B Funding

On September 30th, 2014, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong published a blog^[56] post announcing that the site had received $50 million of additional funding from a group of Series B (second round) investors, including quite a few Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs like the Y Combinator's founding members Sam Altman and Jessica Livingston, Sequoia Capital's venture capitalist Aflred Lin, Netscape's co-founder Marc Andreessen, Paypal's co-founder Peter Thiel, Eventbrite's co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz, Minted's CEO Mariam Naficy and Votsu's co-founder Josh Kushner, as well as actor and musician Jared Leto, rapper Calvin Broadus Jr. (a.k.a. Snoop Dogg) and author Jessica Livingston. In addition, Wong announced that 10% of the investor's shares would go "back to the community," although there were little specific details of how the distribution model would work. In the comments section of the post, Wong also mentioned that the company was looking into launching its own cryptocurrency that could be backed by the investor shares:

CEO Resignation

On November 13th, 2014, Ohanian posted an announcement on the Reddit blog,^[58] revealing that Yishan Wong had resigned from his position as CEO of the company and was being replaced by Ellen Pao as interim CEO. Additionally, Ohanian declared he would be returning to Reddit as Executive Chairman. That day, Reddit board member Sam Altman published a blog post^[57] claiming that Wong had resigned from Reddit due to "a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease)." Also on November 13th, Wong posted an answer to the question "Why did Yishan Wong resign as Reddit CEO?" on Quora,^[59] where he confirmed Altman's statements and added that he was "completely worn out" after two-and-a-half years as Reddit's CEO.

Notable Developments

2015 Blackout Protests

(A full recap of what happened in detail is available here on Reddit.) Late in the day on July 2nd, 2015, it became known to the Reddit community that Victoria Taylor (aka /u/chooter), the talent coordinator for r/iama, had been fired for unknown reasons. Speculation claimed that she was in disagreement with the management in regards to commercial decisions Reddit was attempting to make, including the creation of a video AMA format.^[59] After learning of the firing, the moderators of /r/iama changed the settings for the subreddit to private because it was impossible for the subreddit to operate without Victoria. /u/karmanaut explained that "Tl;dr: for /r/IAMA to work the way it currently does, we need Victoria. Without her, we need to figure out a different way for it to work." in this post here. This, effectively blacked out one of the most popular subreddits on the site.

Soon after r/iama went private, the mods of other popular subreddits began privatizing their sections of the site as well. At the height of the blackout, more than 300 different subreddits with more than 5,000 readers were either privatized or locked, including many with hundreds of thousands of readers, including /r/science, /r/sports, and /r/dataisbeautiful.^[56] (A full list is available here.) Reasons for the blackout vary between subreddits but there has been a general consensus that moderators were not being given proper tools or being valued by Reddit's admins. An unknown amount of redditors flocked to voat.co during this blackout in protest, which caused voat.co servers to overload and it went down for about a day. Nearly all rage toward these events has been directed at reddit CEO Ellen K. Pao (aka /u/ekjp).

In addition, on July 3rd, 2015, the top 100 posts in /r/all were all about the Victoria Taylor situation or the Reddit Blackout as a whole, and as of July 4th, 2015, posts are being upvoted to the front page for having the name 'Victoria' anywhere in them even when completely unrelated. Additionally, posts related to Ellen K. Pao's character and lawsuit, and posts related to the Reddit competitor Voat were also being upvoted.

Ellen K. Pao has commented on the blackout and the departure of Victoria, saying "the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours."^[60] A petition calling for her to resign on change.org has also surpassed 200,000 signatures and can be viewed and signed here. Ellen K. Pao's account /u/ekjp is also under questioning by the reddit community for extreme vote manipulation which if true would be violating Reddit's rules. This questioning can be viewed here and here.

About three months before the blackout on March 30, 2015, breitbart.com was also noting some issues with Ellen K. Pao, one quote being "but admonishing her staff for helping victims of road accidents was just one aspect of Pao’s sociopathy and selfishness." That news story can be viewed here.

The subreddit /r/blackout2015 received over 10,000 subscribers in fewer than 11 hours.^[57] Alex Ohanian, the CEO of Reddit, admitted that the firing was handled incorrectly and that the mods should have been notified, claiming that "your message was heard loud and clear" and that he would like the blacked out subreddits to return to live as soon as possible. ^[58]

Blackout Censorship and Related Terminations

Victoria was fired which is what caused the Blackout to begin with, but that is not the only related Reddit firing while Ellen K. Pao was CEO of Reddit. As of July 3rd, 2015, Jokes are being made about the censorship by Ellen K. Pao and admins all across Reddit. An AMA by a fired employee of Reddit named Dacvak explaining how he was fired due to cancer was deleted by Dacvak along with all his replies. The AMA has since been archived and is viewable here. Another reddit worker that was fired is redditor kickme444, creator of the r/secretsanta subreddit and the redditgifts Twitter page. The subreddit will have to find a way to go on without him as of this post he made. He has since been removed from the subreddit and his firing is said to be a result of him voicing concerns over Reddit's leadership.

Respected, admins /u/chooter (Victoria Taylor) and /u/kickme444 (Dan McComas) from Reddit.

Reddit began automatically censoring any posts in /r/Pics with the name 'Victoria' in it as evidenced here. This goes directly against the Reddit’s stance in favor of free speech. /u/krispykrackers is an admin for that subreddit and was mentioned on July 3, 2015, in co-founder Alex Ohanian’s response to the subreddit blackout here, Alex specifically saying "u/krispykrackers, a well-trusted employee and community member, is now going to be point person for moderator issues. This should help alleviate the immediate pain, and we'll continue to evaluate how it's working going forward." With this information it is possible the admin /u/krispykrackers had a hand in the auto-censorship. Another mod for /r/Pics by the username /u/solidwhetstone stepped down as mod in addition to closing down their own rather large subreddit /r/crappydesign which had over 180k subscribers. The reason for doing both these things was in specific protest of Reddit's treatment of Victoria and also the auto-censorship of /r/Pics posts with the word 'Victoria' in them. /u/solidwhetstone's reddit post regarding this is available here.

Ban in Russia

On August 12th, 2015, Russia added Reddit to its list of banned websites. The reasoning given by Russia for this decision was that Reddit's content promotes drug usage. The page inside Reddit that offended Russia was titled "Minimal and Reliable Methods for Growing Psilocybe [Mushrooms]." On August 10th, 2015, Russia censors complained they were unable to contact Reddit's admins, the officials publicly stating "we assume that the website is simply understaffed during the summer holidays, but this is no excuse to risk [losing] its entire audience [in Russia]."^[61] On August 13th, 2015, Russia removed Reddit from its list of banned websites.^[62] The reasoning given by Russia for this decision was that Reddit's administrators got in touch with them.

Nazi Content Crackdown

On October 25th, 2017, Reddit moderator^[69] landoflobsters posted an announcement about a site-wide rules update in regards to violent content on the /r/modnews subreddit. According to the bulletin, any content that can be viewed as inciting violence or hate against an individual or a group of people, including abuse of animals, on the site would be subject to moderation.

Shortly after the note was published, users began asking questions about specific subreddits, such as /r/Nazi, /r/far_right, /r/DylannRoofInnocent and more. Additionally, specific comments are being deleted for violating the terms of the update.

Meanwhile, others called for for the removal of the /r/incels and /r/The_Donald subreddits. In response to the complaints, Reddit administrator landoflobsters replied, “When reporting an entire sub, we’d want to see a few examples of what could be considered rule-violating behavior. A few example posts, example comments that weren’t taken down etc. We review entire subs very carefully but it helps if we have a jumping off point of where to look.” Shortly after, Redditor DivestTrump replied with a list of /r/The_Donald comments as examples of "calls for violence" (shown below).
^[74]

Several media outlets covered the update, including BuzzFeed, ^[70] The Verge,^[71] Newsweek,^[72] Engadget^[73] and more.

Top Posts of 2017

On December 19th, 2017, Redditor redtaboo^[75] posted a few top-ten lists relevant to Reddit in 2017. Of note, the top Reddit post of the year was a picture of General Palpatine from /r/movies related to an I Am The Senate joke. The post gained 349,000 upvotes (shown below). Other notable posts include the origin for How Many Upvotes For Our Boys In Blue and several posts about Net Neutrality. Also of note, one of the top new subreddits of 2017 was /r/bonehurtingjuice. /r/PrequelMemes received an honorable mention as it was made several days before 2017. Top AMAs include Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and the creators of Futurama.

Features

Registered users can submit posts to the site in the form of links or text only submissions. Posts, and comments within them, can be voted upon by clicking the up arrow to "up vote" or down arrow to "down vote". The posts and comments are then scored accordingly, and can be sorted from high to low. Reddit contains thousands of individual "subreddits" that can be subscribed to that cover an immense variety of topics and interests. Unregistered users can browse existing posts and read comments, but cannot subscribe, vote, comment or submit posts.

Technology

According to the official reddit blog^[20], the site switched programming languages from Lisp to Python in 2005. On July 21st, reddit^[21] announced that they would be outsourcing their search to index handling service IndexTank. Reddit has strong ties to popular image hosting website Imgur^[17], which was created by Redditor mcgrimm. Mobile applications that use reddit's API include Android apps "reddit is fun"^[18] and "reddit pics".^[19]

Subreddit Communities

Default Subreddits

Other Notable Subreddits

Directory of Subreddits

On May 29th, 2013, Redditor Douglasmacarthur posted a directory^[54] of the top 200 most active subreddit communities sorted into 14 major categories to /r/TheoryOfReddit (shown below). In the post, the original poster explained that he started the project after noticing the challenging task of moderators having to guide and redirect individual users toward their appropriate communities in the absence of a non-default subreddit index. Although adult-only subreddits were initially excluded from the directory, the OP later followed up with a directory of NSFW subreddits upon request in an offsite post.^[55]

Community

Notable Redditors

Since April 2010, the website KarmaWhores.net^[29] has been tracking Redditors who have gained the most karma on the site, breaking down top 20 users in 4 categories: Comment Karma, Link Karma, Well-rounded (a currently unknown calculation) and Top Combined Karma. Though not a full database of Reddit, the site tracks more than 17,000 users with more than 253 million karma amongst them as of October 2012.

As of October 2012, Apostolate^[30] has the most comment karma, 1,128,525. Maxwellhill^[31] has both the most link karma (1,572,943) and combined karma (1,579,188). Other notable accounts on the list for top comment karma include andrewsmith1986^[32], Trapped_in_Reddit^[33], who has been accused of gaming Reddit karma^[34], Shitty_Watercolour^[35], who goes through the front page and paints linked images, text posts or commentary, ProbablyHittingOnYou^[36], TheAtomicPlayboy^[37], Drunken_Economist^[38], and NotaMethAddict.^[39]

The other top users of link karma include Scopolamina^[40], who posts pornographic images in a variety of subreddits, mepper^[41], DrJulianBashir^[42], the deleted users MindVirus, Mind_Virus and violentacrez, the moderator of more than 400 subreddits including /r/Jailbait, who deleted his account^[43] on October 10th, 2012.

Celebrity Redditors

Several celebrities^[44] keep moderately active public Reddit accounts that they have continued to use after doing Ask Me Anything threads. After joining in September 2011, American actor Zach Braff^[45] has submitted several videos and commented in /r/pics, /r/funny and /r/wtf. Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson^[46] and 74-time winning Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings^[47] will occasionally comment on posts about themselves.Breaking Bad's "Marco," Luis Moncada^[48], often participates in the show's subreddit, commenting on fan art as well as live episode discussions.

Secret Santa

According to an article in Venture Beat^[15], reddit started one of the largest Secret Santa programs in the entire world with over "17,000 Reddit users from 90 countries are exchanging gifts" in the 2010 holiday season. The r/secretsanta^[16] subreddit was created on November 10th, 2010, and has 14,154 subscribers as of September 30th, 2011. This subreddit was headed by Reddit admin /u/kickme444 (Dan McComas) (now fired and removed from the subreddit for his concerns over Reddit's leadership). Dan did a TED Talk about the Secret Santa subreddit.

Global Meet Up Day

In addition to the Secret Santa event, Reddit community regularly holds regional meet-up events^[25] throughout the year, including the annual Global Meetup Day^[28] which takes place in mid-June. The idea for a global day of meet up was first proposed by Redditor TheSilentNumber in a series of threads^[23] submitted between December 25th and 29th, 2009. The inaugural meet up event was eventually held across at least two dozens of cities between June 19th and 25th, 2010, including one in downtown Los Angeles where it was attended by the co-founder of Reddit Alex Ohanian. The complete listing of meet up events was made available in a FAQ page.^[24]

The second annual weekend of meetup took place during the same weekend of June 25th in 2011, which resulted in a turnout of more than 196 regional meetups for 4,000 Redditors in 40 countries across the world. All of the regional events were organized through RedditGifts.com^[26], which provided a directory of related threads for local events and a Google Maps displaying the time and location all planned meetups across the world.

The third annual event is scheduled to take place around the same time as the years before in late June 2012. As of June 25th, more than 477 local meetups have been arranged via RedditGifts.com.^[27]

Charity

Reddit has been known for its altruistic community that have participated in several charity events. On December 10th, 2010, a post was made by Redditor Denny-Crane^[9] outlining details about a holiday charity drive competition between the r/Christian and r/Atheism subreddits. The r/Islam subreddit ended up joining in as well, and according to an article on The Huffington Post^[10] the three communities managed to raise $45,000 combined (the atheists community raised the largest amount).

As of Dec. 16, the 105,587 members of the atheist group had raised $32,802 of their $42,000 goal. The Christian group, with 9,017 followers, had raised $11,443 toward its $12,000 goal. The Muslim group, with 2,224 followers, had raised $360 of its $5,000 goal.

In October of 2010, a story was posted to the site about how 7-year-old Kathleen Edward, who was dying of Huntington's Disease, was harassed by her neighbors who made fun of her illness.^[14] Redditors responded by pooling together to buy the girl a shopping spree. Afterwards, Kathleen made a sign thanking the reddit community for their generosity.

2014 Scavenger Hunt

On September 29th, 2014, Reddit admin highshelfofsteam submitted a post to the /r/secretsanta^[60] subreddit calling for volunteers from around the United States to help hide “boxes of goodies” at specific locations in their respective local areas. On November 19th, highshelfosteam announced the launch of the scavenger hunt in a post on the official Reddit blog,^[61] revealing that a total of 56 packages containing products from the Reddit marketplace had been hidden around the world, including 50 states in the U.S., one in the District of Columbia and five in other countries. Clues about the actual locations of the hidden boxes were posted in their respective local subreddit communities and their statuses were updated once the packages had been found.

Upvoted.com

On January 8th, 2015, Reddit launched the podcast Upvoted, which features interviews with Redditors who had submitted interesting and popular stories to the social news site.^[66] The first episode featured an interview with Redditor Dante Orpilla, who participated in an "ask me anything" post about being sentenced to prison for 10 years in 2010 (shown below).

That month, Reddit began heavily promoting the podcast with sponsored posts,^[63] which received comments criticizing the podcast as a marketing campaign aimed at potential investors. On October 6th, Reddit^[68] announced the launch of the Upvoted^[64] Internet news site (shown below).

On November 5th, Redditor Hedgehog_sandwich submitted a post titled "Reddit's 'Upvoted' blog is literally everything redditers hate about reddit," featuring a screenshot of an Upvoted post with the caption "How would Felicia Day Fight a Horde-Sized Duck?" (shown below). Within two weeks, the post received upwards of 1,800 votes (92% upvoted) and 90 comments on the /r/CorporateFacepalm^[65] subreddit. On November 18th, Redditor Samamu submitted a post asking "Why does everyone hate the Upvoted podcast" to the /r/OutOfTheLoop^[67] subreddit, where several users responded that it had a reputation as an advertiser-friendly clickbait site.

Controversy

The subreddit dedicated to non-nude photos of teenage girls r/jailbait has sparked several debates about whether or not it should exist on reddit. According to a Gawker^[11] article by Adrian Chen, the section was shutdown due to an "internal power struggle between moderators" on August 17th, 2011.

One of the most popular of these sections was Jailbait, with over 20,000 subscribers. Jailbait featured pictures of tween girls in various compromising positions, many apparently taken from social networking profiles without their knowledge. There were rules, like "please don't post pictures of girls with tattoos": "Generally, girls have to be of the age of consent to get a tattoo, so if she has a tattoo, she's probably also of legal age, and therefore not jailbait."

According to a followup article on Gawker^[12], the subreddit was reinstated after problems with the moderators were resolved on September 1st, 2011. Reddit General Manager Erik Martin claimed that jailbait's return was not a result of the move from Condé Nast to Advance Publications.

No, Martin said, "the two are completely unrelated." In fact, Conde Nast was totally chill with Jailbait, despite an increasing amount of media coverage of it and other stomach-churning subsections dedicated to dead babies and beating women.

On September 30th, 2011, a thread titled "Anderson Cooper Accuses Reddit Of Spreading Child Pornography"^[13] was posted that linked to a YouTube clip of the CNN show Anderson Cooper 360 attacking the site's subreddit and claiming it was essentially child pornography. Cooper read a statement from reddit CEO Eric Marden regarding the decision to not censor the subreddit.

Cooper contacted reddit CEO Eric Marden, who responded with the statement: "We're a free speech site and the cost of that is there's offensive stuff on there…Once we start taking down some things we find offensive, then we're no longer a free speech site and no longer a platform for everyone. We're exerting editorial control and that's not what we are."

Spezgate

On November 23rd, 2014, Redditor CEO Steve Huffman admitted to editing the comments made by Redditors on the /r/The_Donald subreddit.

"Yep. I messed with the ‘fuck u/spez‘ comments. As much as we try to maintain a good relationship with you all, it does get old getting called a pedophile constantly. As the CEO, I shouldn’t play such games, and it’s all fixed now. Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won’t do this again."

Fan Art

Several pages worth of fan art can be found on the website DeviantArt under the tag "#reddit."^[22] Fan art often includes depictions of the reddit alien mascot.

Related Memes

As one of the most influential communities in facilitating the creation and proliferation of viral internet media, Reddit has been credited as the birthplace of many internet memes and its userbase recognized as a driving force in Internet trendsetting. Among the most notable memes from Reddit include popular Rage Comic characters like Yao Ming Face and Obama's Not Bad Face, viral media celebrities such as Ridiculously Photogenic Guy and Overly Attached Girlfriend, as well as a variety of Advice Animal image macro series. For more comprehensive listings of internet memes that have originated from Reddit, check out KYM Tag – Origin:Reddit. For an index of notable memes that have been widely adopted by the userbase, browse KYM Tag – Tags:Reddit.

Karma Whore

“Karma Whore” is a pejorative label used to describe someone who seeks to raise one’s social standing within an online community by pandering to the stereotypical prejudices or trends that are accepted by its members. While the term is believed to have been coined on the tech news site Slashdot as early as in January 2000, it is equally applicable in the context of Reddit.

Mister Splashy Pants

Mister Splashy Pants is the nickname given to a humpback whale that was tracked via satellite by the environmental organization Greenpeace in 2007. The name was chosen after it won an online poll conducted by Greenpeace which garnered much attention from Reddit.^[1]

The Narwhal Bacons at Midnight

The Narwhal Bacons at Midnight is a catchphrase that was created for Redditors to identify themselves in public places. It is used in fan art, rage comics, and is often referenced as an inside joke in Reddit threads.

Waffles? Don't You Mean Carrots?

"Waffles? Don't You Mean Carrots?" is a non-sequitur phrase invented by a group of Redditors in order to stir confusion among other users of the site who had attended Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington D.C. in late October 2010.

Downvoting Roman

Downvoting Roman is an image macro series featuring a stillshot of actor Joaquin Phoenix^[1] as Emperor Commodus in the 2000 epic film Gladiator. The image depicts a stone-faced Commodus giving a thumbs down and the overlaid text usually conveys dissatisfaction towards a post on a website or forum where a voting system is present, especially on Reddit.

Upvoting Obama

Upvoting Obama is an image macro series featuring President Barack Obama with a beer giving a thumbs up while making a frown sturgeon face, which bears resemblance to one he wears in the Not Bad rage face. The images are primarily used on Reddit to express one's approval of a post.

Mad Karma with Jim Cramer

Mad Karma with Jim Cramer is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photoshopped image of Jim Cramer, former hedge fund manager and the host of the MSNBC business news program Mad Money. On Reddit, the character is often used as an indicator of an up-and-coming meme or a trending discussion topic, similar to the use of Imminent Ned and The Rent is Too Damn High.

Aaron Swartz Memorial

On January 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz -- one of Reddit's co-founders -- committed suicide after dealing with lengthy legal proceedings over his alleged abuse of the MIT public internet system and alleged "hack" of JSTOR, a database of scholarly articles and journals.^[49] Swartz had been charged with accessing MIT's network illegally through a non-public port in an unlocked closet, and then subsequently accessing JSTOR to download hundreds of articles in bulk to be read later. He faced 35 years in jail for his alleged crimes. The case had already elicited controversy – but MIT and JSTOR refused to press charges, and several experts were lined up to testify in Swartz's favor.^[50] JSTOR later issued a statement expressing its regret over the tragedy.^[51] Following his death, a campaign was started on Twitter to encourage people to upload copyrighted articles to Google Docs or other public databases, and to then tweet the URL with the hashtag #pdftribute.^[52] A petition was also created, asking President Obama to remove Carmen Ortiz – the district attourney responsible for the Swartz case – from office.^[53]

Traffic

On February 2nd, 2011, the official reddit blog announced that they had reached over 1 billion pageviews in a single month,^[8] and posted a Google Analytics screenshot as evidence. As of September 30th, 2011, reddit.com has a Quantcast^[5] US rank of 66, an Alexa^[6] US rank of 43, and a Compete^[7] rank of 1314. As of June 2015, Reddit accrues 334 million (334,626,161) monthly pageviews, with more than 36.1 million user accounts, with up to 26,000 accounts that are potentially duplicate.

Statistics

All statistics below were posted on June 24th, 2015 in celebration of the site's 10th anniversary.

• 16 billion upvotes (16,063,942,290) and 2.6 billion downvotes (2,563,574,752)
• 1.7 billion comments (1,715,454,785 / .36% of which mention cats)
• 190 million posts (190,227,552 / 36% self posts vs link)
• Nearly 30 million dollars ($29,559,467.54) worth of RedditGifts exchanged in 201 sessions
• 853,824 active subreddits

Search Interest

Search queries for "reddit" have risen steadily since the site launched in 2005, and have yet to hit their highest spike as of September 30th, 2011.

External References