Takeaways:
In the run up to its IPO, Reddit faces criticism from users for selling out, and skepticism from investors for its lack of profitability.
However, the company has done a remarkable job maintaining active, high quality communities on a public Internet deluged with AI-generated, SEO-optimized garbage.
Reddit is the healthiest and most vibrant social network; preserving its playful brand while walking the fine line between anarchic community and viable business.
This Sunday is the Superbowl - American families will gather round their TVs to critique commercials, watch a short but extremely well-produced pop concert and - if they care for it - catch a bit of American Football.
My own Superbowl ritual is quite different - I do indulge in some of the commercial critiquing, but mainly I am on Reddit’s r/superbowl subreddit watching baffled sports fans arrive and contend with a series of majestic photos of birds - what the pun-lovers among you may have already worked out are “superb owls”.
For years the self-moderated r/superbowl has promoted these elegant birds, in defiance of those who would co-opt their community for the mundane practice of sports commentary.
The clash is emblematic of a tension at the heart of Reddit for years - anarchic, community-driven fun that represents the core of the platform’s success, running up against the increasingly profit-driven interests of the company.
The tension will come to a head this year as Reddit prepares for an IPO in March. The US economy may be resurgent, but it is a hostile environment for tech companies and startup valuations.
Reddit has detractors on both sides of its platform - users have been lamenting its normification and commercialization for years, while big businesses are skeptical of having their ads sit alongside incel hate-speech, or r/wallstreetbets investment banter that only occasionally rises above ‘jokes’ where the punchline is a community member ‘being retarded’.
My personal take, though, is that Reddit has actually done an incredibly impressive job building a viable business, while protecting the core of what makes its community engagement valuable - the vibrance of its groups and the playful nature of its brand. Plus, it is doing this in conditions where any business decision will be met with scornful criticism from some loud and powerful faction.
In fact, I think that Reddit’s combination of self-moderated, interest-based communities and pseudonymous interaction makes it the best (healthiest, highest quality) model for a mass social network that the Internet can support today.
Here’s why I feel this way.
I have a dim view in general of most ‘public’ social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok etc.). The reasons for this have been regurgitated ad nauseum over the last decade, but remain true:
Dumbing down discourse by promoting ever shorter posts/videos.
Polarizing debates by promoting simple messages.
Creating echo-chambers through algorithmic bias.
Promoting extreme emotions.
Subverted by nation-states for political ends.
Flooded with AI-produced, engagement-optimized ‘content’.
Reddit has to contend with all of the issues I listed above, but the unique nature of its platform (public but atomized groups, human-moderated) has allowed it to retain a sense of community and quality as the rest of the public Internet has drowned in garbage, and users flee to private communities on Whatsapp, Discord etc.
You can see this retention of quality in the now standard advice to append ‘Reddit’ to a Google search if you want actually useful results.
There is a lot of clickbait and low effort content on Reddit’s ‘Popular’ feed, but if you have a specific hobby or interest (say crochet or clay pigeon shooting) there are helpful and in large part friendly communities to talk about the topic or get advice. Larger communities on Reddit struggle with polarized debate, doxxing and hate-speech, but the human moderators do an order of magnitude better job than other platforms’ algorithms in…well…moderating them. And yes, algorithmic echo-chambers, nation-state astroturfing and banal AI-generated content are a thing, but again, tireless human moderation and heavy self-curation of the communities you care about make the experience feel far higher quality.
Annual events orchestrated by Reddit reinforce the values of community participation and co-creation that are essential to the platform’s survival. r/place (below) allowed any user to place a colored pixel on a vast canvas so that communities could coordinate to create artworks.
And the fact that the community used the platform to mount a protest against the company’s CEO (Steve Huffman aka u/spez) may have been ego-bruising for him personally, but it reinforces Reddit’s overall values of free expression and discourse.
Unlike most of its peers, Reddit is still pseudonymous. This is a negative for its advertising business (limiting targeting and profiling) and elevates harassment and profanity on the platform - people are far more likely to be nasty if their actions can’t be tied back to them as a person. The flipside is that people are often willing to share far more and more honestly, and can if they want to maintain a degree of anonymity and safety that protects them from real-world retaliation.
Contrast this with LinkedIn, one of the healthier non-anonymous social networks. Harassment and hate-speech on LinkedIn is minimal compared to Reddit (although it does happen) because behaviour is held in check by members’ connection to their professional identity and fragile professional reputation. This same self-censorship on LinkedIn, though, limits openness and has hampered formation of groups sharing valuable, high quality business information.
LinkedIn offers another cautionary warning as Reddit prepares to IPO. In the past decade LinkedIn has doubled down on its advertising business, bringing a focus on content creation and engagement on its ‘feed’. Optimizing its algorithms and user behavior for more sharing, likes and comments has pushed LinkedIn down the Facebook path of lower effort, shorter and more shareable public posts - degrading quality. Reddit has significant infrastructure and headcount costs, and it needs to become profitable to be viable as a public company. On the other hand, sacrificing quality and depth of discussion on the platform to eke out advertising dollars would almost certainly be terminal for its communities.
There are no easy solutions for the challenges Reddit will have to manage in the coming years - how to retain the trust and loyalty of its army of unpaid human moderators, how to leverage and safeguard its incredibly valuable content as AI models gobble up everything public on the Internet, and how to stay a little bit weird as user growth inevitably ‘normifies’ the platform.
But next time you hear someone deriding Reddit for its many, valid flaws, maybe think of Winston Churchill’s comment that democracy is “the worst form of government, except for all the others”.
As it approaches its IPO, Reddit may be an unprofitable social network struggling with harassment, moderation issues and a deluge of bots and AI generated content. But I struggle to think of anyone who’s doing a better job.
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