the reddit 2020

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 .

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, 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.

Condé Nast Acquisition

On October 31st, 2006, reddit was acquired by the magazine publishing company Condé Nast. On September 6th, 2011, an announcement posted to the official reddit blog 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 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, that could be backed by the investor shares:

CEO Resignation

On November 13th, 2014, Ohanian posted an announcement on the Reddit blog, revealing that Yishan Wong had resigned from his position as CEO of the company and was being replaced by 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 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, 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 . 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. () 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 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." A petition calling for her to resign on change.org has also surpassed 200,000 signatures and can be viewed and signed .

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 .

The subreddit /r/blackout2015 received over 10,000 subscribers in fewer than 11 hours. 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.

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 .

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 .

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]." On August 13th, 2015, Russia removed Reddit from its list of banned websites. 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 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/far_right, /r/DylannRoofInnocent and more. Additionally, specific comments are being deleted for violating the terms of the update.

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).

, The Verge, Newsweek, Engadget and more.

Top Posts of 2017

On December 19th, 2017, Redditor redtaboo 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 .

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

Subreddit Communities

Default Subreddits

• /r/AdviceAnimals: Advice animal images allowed. (1,503,192 subscribers)
• /r/announcements: Important items from the official Reddit blog.(2,498,852 subscribers)
• /r/AskReddit: Discussion-inspiring questions directed to the Reddit user base. Personal information, material, personal information, polls and yes/no questions are forbidden. (2,335,406 subscribers)
• /r/atheism: Posts related to , agnosticism and secularism. (1,245,359 subscribers)
• /r/aww: Photographs of . Captioned images are not allowed. (1,436,638 subscribers)
• /r/bestof: Notable stories, comments and posts by other Redditors. No self posts are allowed unless they contain discussions about the subreddit. (1,462,052 subscribers)
• /r/blog: Posts made to the official Reddit blog not related to website functionality changes are submitted here. (2,326,563 subscribers)
• /r/funny: Humor-related links and discussions. Image macros, politics, and screenshots are forbidden. (2,565,017 subscribers)
• /r/gaming: Content related to and advice animals are forbidden. (2,125,696 subscribers)
• /r/IAmA: (AMA) posts in which the original poster must be verified by a moderator. Famous actors, artists, scientists, internet personalities and other celebrities frequent the subreddit. (2,072,327 subscribers)
• /r/movies: Discussions, news, reviews and media about various films. Promoting illegal filesharing, image macros, punchline jokes, flame wars, racism and homophobic remarks are strickly forbidden. (1,504,903 subscribers)
• /r/music: Posts sharing and discussing various types of music. No images allowed. (1,567,108 subscribers)
• /r/pics: Photographs and pictures. Image macros, screenshots, comics, infographics, text, gore and are strictly forbidden. (2,503,738 subscribers)
• /r/politics: News related to United States politics only. (1,980,961 subscribers)
• /r/science: News related to scientific research and discovery. Image macros and jokes are forbidden. (2,117,305 subscribers)
• /r/technology: Technology-related news. No images or allowed. (1,881,793 subscribers)
• /r/todayilearned: Verifiable discoveries that are older than two months. Political discoveries and obvious facts are not allowed. (2,154,821 subscribers)
• /r/videos: Videos on various websites including and Liveleak. Political videos are forbidden. (1,986,305 subscribers)
• /r/worldnews: News from around the world with the exception of the United States. (2,240,235 subscribers)
• /r/: Unusual, disturbing and weird content. Image macros, rage comics and politics are forbidden. (2,096,937 subscribers)

Other Notable Subreddits

• /r/askscience: Questions directed toward's Reddit's scientific community. All discussion must be scientific, civil, on topic and free of layman speculation. (632,650 subscribers)
• /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu: Rage comics. No image macros, comparison comics, reposts or comics less than two or greater than eight panels. (558,131 subscribers)
• /r/programming: News and discussion about computer programming. (395,830 subscribers)
• /r/gifs: Animated GIFs with the exception of reaction GIFs. (357,710 subscribers)
• /r/trees: -related news, media and discussion. (326,433 subscribers)
• /r/minecraft: -related news media and discussion. (239,295 subscribers)
• /r/sex: Discussions about sexuality and sexual relationships. (212,614 subscribers)
• /r/4chan: Content related to the . Posts typically consist of links to screen captures of 4chan threads. (190,735 subscribers)
• /r/woahdude: Interesting and captivating games, video, audio and images meant to view while under the influence of drugs. (142,170 subscribers)
• /r/: Self posts sarcastically mocking cliché beliefs, practices or phrases associated with the Reddit community. (118,274 subscribers)
• /r/twoXChromosomes: Discussion related to topics related to gender from a female perspective. (109,207 subscribers)
• /r/foodporn: High-quality photographs of well-prepared food. Videos, galleries and articles are forbidden. (89,850 subscribers)
• /r/gentlemanboners: Classy photographs of attractive women. No pictures of women in jeans are allowed. (84,040 subscribers)
• /r/seduction: Advice for men seeking to have sexual relationships with the opposite sex. (83,878 subscribers)
• /r/mensrights: Discussion related to the . (48,129 subscribers)
• /r/ladyboners: Photographs of attractive men. (47,786 subscribers)
• /r/subredditdrama: Discussions about dramatic events from other subreddits. (37,955 subscribers)
• /r/. (32,973 subscribers)
• /r/shitredditsays: Posts on Reddit that have been deemed offensive by members of this subreddit. (23,785 subscribers)
• /r/spacedicks: Gore, porn and other unusual media. Kitsch artworks circulating around the theme of penises. (17,853 subscribers)
  
  

Directory of Subreddits

On May 29th, 2013, Redditor Douglasmacarthur posted a directory 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.

Notable Redditors

Since April 2010, the website 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.

has the most comment karma, 1,128,525. Maxwellhill 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, Trapped_in_Reddit, who has been accused of gaming Reddit karma, Shitty_Watercolour, who goes through the front page and paints linked images, text posts or commentary, ProbablyHittingOnYou, TheAtomicPlayboy, Drunken_Economist, and NotaMethAddict.

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

Celebrity Redditors

Several celebrities keep moderately active public Reddit accounts that they have continued to use after doing as well as live episode discussions.

Secret Santa

According to an article in Venture Beat, 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 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 about the Secret Santa subreddit.

Global Meet Up Day

In addition to the Secret Santa event, Reddit community regularly holds regional meet-up events throughout the year, including the annual Global Meetup Day 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 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.

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.

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 outlining details about a holiday charity drive competition between the r/ subreddit ended up joining in as well, and according to an article on The Huffington Post 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. 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 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, 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 post about being sentenced to prison for 10 years in 2010 (shown below).

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

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 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, 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" 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 under the tag "#reddit." 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 .

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

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.

The Narwhal Bacons at Midnight

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?

in Washington D.C. in late October 2010.

Downvoting Roman

is an image macro series featuring a stillshot of actor Joaquin Phoenix 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

, 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

.

Aaron Swartz Memorial

On January 11, 2013, #pdftribute. A petition was also created, asking President Obama to remove Carmen Ortiz – the district attourney responsible for the Swartz case – from office.

Traffic

On February 2nd, 2011, the official reddit blog announced that they had reached over 1 billion pageviews in a single month, and posted a Google Analytics screenshot as evidence. As of September 30th, 2011, reddit.com has a Quantcast US rank of 66, an Alexa US rank of 43, and a Compete 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.

Know Your Meme Store

External References