How Is Reddit Still A Thing?
There are many pockets of the internet that evoke controversy, but few are as prolific as Reddit.
Founded in 2005 by two graduates from the University of Virginia, the social media and news aggregation site, Reddit, has been the birthplace of a thousand memes, viral images, and news stories throughout the modern internet era.
The Dark Side
However, it’s also been a breeding ground for outrage, serving as the source of a list of controversies that are hard to keep track of. Notable examples include a nude celebrity photo scandal, where highly personal photos of highly public individuals were released online, a misguided manhunt after the Boston Marathon bombings, and the existence of the subreddit of 4chan, which is known to delight in content that’s vile, offensive and incredibly hostile and highly derogatory to women. One might have thought that when Reddit was acquired by publishing giant Conde Nast in 2006 that the platform would have mellowed and become slightly more mainstream. But curiously, it hasn’t. It’s been popular for more than a decade, and has remained so without much innovation in its design, content, or tone since then.
Growing Numbers
It would make sense if Reddit had survived by virtue of being a hotspot for a relatively small, yet devoted number of visitors. But that’s not so. According to the site’s Wiki, “As of 2016, Reddit had 542 million monthly visitors (234 million unique users), ranking #11 most visited website in US and #25 in the world.” It’s clear that more than ten years on, Reddit is not just a niche breeding ground for offensive memes, but still a major internet destination for traffic. As the site announced on its tenth birthday, “If we were a country, our current active users would make up the 8th largest population in the world, just after Nigeria and larger than Russia, Japan, and Mexico.”
The No-Brand Branding
One of the hallmarks of Reddit seems to be its visually plain interface and subpar UI, and yhis so-called “early internet” aesthetic is apparently part of its appeal. As one contributor on Quora put it, “Reddit, along with sites like Craigslist have simply created a branding around the idea of bare-bones, or anti-branding. This follows suit with the ideology behind modernism and the idea that form should always follow function.”
In other words, Reddit is no-frills internet for people who don’t want a glossy and overly-designed interface, but rather a place to gather around niche and devoted topics. In that sense, the site has been very successful, but turning it into a viable business has been tough.
As Mashable wrote in a definitive history of the site, “Reddit is a case study for how a website can attract a large and dedicated user base, in spite of some chaos and lack of direction inside the company, and then struggle to convert that popularity into a viable business. It’s a reminder that sometimes the hardest thing for a tech company isn’t building a devoted community, but figuring out what to do with it. Traffic was never the problem. Everything else was.”
If You Write It, They Will Come
Many posit the reason that Reddit has survived is down to the age-old internet adage: content is king. Reddit’s broad usership has survived despite bad design, unstable leadership, and an unviable business model simply because it offers access to content that users cannot find elsewhere. The fact that that content is often offensive or controversial only helps the site, as what traffics well on the internet tends to be the outlandish, outrageous and of course, highly clickable. In a sense, its bare bones interface helps sets it apart from other sites, who offer more style over novel content.