The Story of Reddit

With this decision, Redditors had more freedom and autonomy within the site than they ever had before. This proved to be “a huge competitive advantage in internet applications” such as Reddit in which “users add their own data to that which [Reddit] provides” (O’Reilly, 2005). For the first time, Redditors were no longer just browsing or making posts, but rather building and expanding upon the site. In the near past, other sites such as “Usenet, bulletin boards, email lists, and chat environments” had all previously shown that “on the internet, many people wish to share information, create content, and work with others” (Mathew Allen, 2012).

The introduction of subreddits led to a rapid expansion of the site thanks to user-created subreddits and provided a platform for new users to connect and interact with like-minded individuals. If there was no existing subreddit for a topic, all someone had to do was create one. This shares similarity with an idea mentioned by Mathew Allen stating that Web 2.0 had “much website creation by individual users through services such as Geocities as people made a ‘home’ for themselves online” (Mathew Allen, 2012). Numerous hobbies that were typically stunted by a lack of people to share them with suddenly took off as people could easily find them. Users could connect with each other over shared interests in ways that were not possible before Reddit’s changes.

5. Admin Intervention: The Banning of Subreddits (2011-2015)

With increasing numbers of subreddits, the administrative team could not keep up with the content being added to the site. As noted by Zeavin (2022), how should sites “practice mediated, rule-bound togetherness in virtual public forums?” This proved to be a legitimate concern, thus Reddit prompted its users to choose subreddit moderators to establish guidelines for each subreddit. By this point, users were somewhat responsible for Reddit’s expansion and maintenance. The freedom for users to form their own communities, hold themselves to their own standards, and express themselves online exemplified the essence of Web 2.0. However, Zeavin also questions “the possibilities (and dangers) of gathering online— anonymously” (2022). Here, Zeavin considers the negative consequences that can result from anonymous site usage. Events that took place in the 2010s exhibiting these consequences became a subject of controversy surrounding Reddit.

5.1. “r/jailbait” of 2011

Reddit’s censorship activities of 2014 were precursored by events as far back as 2011. Reddit company administrators became involved in subreddit moderation after they were criticized for a lack thereof. On September 29th, 2011, a segment of Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN condemned the existence of “r/jailbait”, a subreddit created for posting sexually suggestive pictures of underage girls (Morris, 2021). Figure (A), Figure (B).

As a response, some Reddit users defended the site’s freedom of expression and others mocked Anderson Cooper for “discovering” the internet’s darker underbelly (Figure C). This event arguably marked the beginning of Reddit’s journey into the limelight as a highly controversial site, a trait shared by other social media sites like Twitter (Arceneaux & Weiss, 2010).

5.2. Administrator Intervention Goes Site-wide (2014-2015)

In June 2014, Reddit administrators closed “r/beatingwomen”, citing the existence of a doxxing incident that disobeyed Reddit’s user guidelines, earning one of the first official subreddit bans (Alfonso, 2021). This ban referenced existing censorship debates from the initial 2011 jailbreak subreddit controversy.

On the 10th of June, 2015, Reddit banned 5 subreddits, all of them dedicated to questionable, but not illegal, topics. One subreddit had members in the thousands (“r/fatpeoplehate”). Reddit company spokespersons attributed these bans to instances of negative conduct, including online and offline harassment of individuals (Robertson, 2015).

However, despite negative publicity, Reddit was not the first spearhead of questionable internet activity. In the 1980s, the initial web prototype, USENET, had both the uncivil behavior and culturally controversial groups that mirror those on Reddit.

Harassment on Reddit is reminiscent of aggressive and targeting behavior found on USENET–specifically on women.net–called, “flaming” (Zeavin, 2022, p. 644). Flaming on Reddit often happened in comments, such as this comment mocking Anderson Cooper with name-calling in the jailbait threads.

Similar parallels occur between USENET groups and subreddits. The second USENET group on the Alternative Groups list is an NSFW topic. Figure (E). Figure (F). Reddit users in the pictured comment section also discuss risqué subreddits. Figure (G).

Reddit users defend that these sites are morally dubious, but not illegal, illustrating how USENET and Reddit.com facilitated similar online social activities in their respective eras. Figure (H).

5.3. Censorship Debates Among the Larger Digital Sphere in the 2010s

Reddit has historically taken an impartial stance on how its users’ use the site. However, as social media became an increasingly platformized space, public opinion began to sway their corporate neutrality, pushing for a “[reckoning] with their distinctive characteristics as ‘platforms’” (Helmond & van der Vlist, 2019, p. 2). This shift encouraged Reddit to involve itself in content moderation, in turn triggering debate about the extent of its censorship authority.

In 2010, Apple’s App Store also encountered censorship discourse as they began to increasingly regulate various apps on their own platform. For example, Gillespie writes, “[in] May 2010 questions about Apple's oversight grew when more than five thousand sexually suggestive apps were removed from the iTunes store in a single sweep” (Gillespie, p. 53). Gillespie argues that since Apple made decisions about the visibility of certain apps, some aspects of their actions and decision-making process were “unavoidably political”, inviting debate (Gillespie, 2018, p. 52). Reddit similarly experienced such criticism for their subreddit bans, illustrating stricter content moderation trends present in the platform internet era.

The presence of these debates about Apple’s influence over users in the 2010s indicated rising awareness about the importance of information visibility and content curation and corroborates the debates over Reddit’s administrator censorship of controversial subreddits and site niches.

6. User Experience Redesigns (2016-present)

The introduction of Reddit's image uploading tool in 2016 represented a shift away from the reliance on third-party services like Imgur. This change streamlined the process of sharing visual content directly on Reddit, reducing the dependence on external platforms. This shift aligned with web 2.0 principles, where platforms prioritized self-sufficiency, allowing users to create and share content within the platform itself. Additionally, as the internet transitioned to web 2.0, platforms like Reddit recognized the need for multimedia content. Figure (I). Figure (K).

In 2018, the user interface of Reddit underwent its first major redesign since 2008. This new user interface and user experience served to distance Reddit from its origins as a web forum and marked a transition toward the design of other dominant modern social media platforms present in the web 2.0 era. These changes, despite occurring in the late 2010’s, marked Reddit’s slow evolution towards design trends of the Web 2.0 era. Figure (I). Figure (J).

Before the redesign, Reddit had a dense and homogeneous UI, with equal precedence given to posts. Images and videos are previewed as small icons in this page and are accessible by clicking them. The top of the page is clustered with search criteria and links to individual subreddits.

In comparison, the 2018 UI has far less content on screen at any given time, and uses ample whitespace for padding. Media content took up as much space as 6-7 individual posts before the redesign, similar to Facebook and Instagram. Additionally, videos autoplay as users scroll past them. This forces the user to encounter each individual piece of content for a longer period of time. The links at the top of the page have been condensed into dropdown bars to reduce visual clutter. With the new Reddit UI, it is far easier to become distracted by each post as you scroll through the site. This new UI heavily emphasizes multimedia content such as images and videos, which brought the user-experience of Reddit more in-line with Web 2.0 sensibilities.

Reddit also introduced video "shorts,", similar to the way platforms like YouTube and TikTok have embraced short-form video content, further exhibiting web 2.0 standards of user engagement. However, the controversy surrounding these changes also underscores the challenges in transitioning to a more web 2.0-oriented platform, as user feedback and adaptability are critical in this process.

The official intention behind these changes is laid out by Reddit CEO Steve Huffman in a post from 2017. He states “There are a variety of goals, but chief among them is decreasing the bounce rate of first-time visitors and increasing time on site for everyone… when those new people decide to check out Reddit for the first time they're greeted with dystopian Craigslist. We'd like to fix that.” (Pardes, 2018). The CEO explicitly prioritized increasing the time users spend on the site. Citing this metric demonstrates the importance of data aggregation and analytics to Reddit’s redesign in the era of Web 2.0 – the developers of Reddit are actively tracking and responding to their user’s bounce rates and time on the site. Furthermore, this specific objective – increasing user retention – falls in line with live-service monetization schemes such as targeted advertisements and data brokerage. This strategy reflects a distinct Web 2.0 approach to data analytics: “Real time monitoring of user behavior to see just which new features are used, and how they are used…” (O’Reilly, 2005).

Along with the redesign, Reddit rebranded their subscription service into “Reddit Premium”. In this model, paying users would be rewarded with coins that they could use to purchase rewards for posts of their choice. The addition of Reddit rewards reflects how “the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value” in the era of Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005). These rewards are displayed publicly, add visual elements to posts to make them stand out, and boost their visibility in the Reddit algorithm. This system harnesses the collective intelligence of the most dedicated users, amplifying their voices and promoting their choice of content. In a screenshot shown below, Redditors amplified the visibility of a news post by granting it hundreds of awards. The screenshot in figure (L) shows awards above the title of the post.

Reddit’s UI redesign can be clearly and directly connected to many of the principles laid out in Tim O’Reilly’s blog “What is Web 2.0”. Tim writes “The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide… Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application.” (O'Reilly, 2005). Reddit engaged in this strategy by encouraging direct engagement through its revised awards system, and by expanding its total user base with lowered barriers to entry and increased aesthetic appeal. Likewise, Reddit reflected the Web 2.0 of the “perpetual beta” by slowly rolling out the UI changes to portions of their user base. Once the UI was in place, Reddit continued to make small and incremental changes to tune the user experience. These developments aligned with Tim O’Reilly’s advice to “Engage your users as real-time testers, and instrument the service so that you know how people use the new features.” (O'Reilly, 2005).

7. Methodology Review: Using the Wayback Machine for Reddit

Being a forum-based website, Reddit was relatively more accessible through WBM than other websites. This is because since its beginning, Reddit relied heavily on user-generated content in the form of plain text. Media content like photos and videos were uploaded to file sharing websites, which some of them like Imgur had a long retainability span. Overall, few data of Reddit pages was lost after saving it to WBM. However, it increased after the 2016 website redesign that made it more interactive, thereby preventing some collapsed comments from being saved to WBM.

Like other social media sites, the highly dynamic view of recent posts makes it impossible to save every personalized frontpage as well as making API queries. For example, WBM is limited by using the in-site search function to browse for specific topics or subreddits at a given period of time. The URLs of some searched terms were not archived by the web crawler, thus it was difficult to browse for evidence of specific Reddit.com events, such as the 2015 subreddit ban. See figure (P).

Additionally, we encountered multiple layers of difficulty when sifting through the page captures chronologically. Particularly noteworthy is the WBM’s irregular capture dates from multiple different posts and Reddit’s nonlinear chronology of posts and comments when accessing specific dates and events. This was time-consuming, confusing, and minimally rewarding. Yet, it is an experience that web historiographers, especially those documenting social media sites, must endure to order events and evidence linearly.

On the other hand, we found some of Reddit’s history well-preserved through news websites. For example, a Redditor linked to a page displaying evidence of CNN’s Anderson Cooper covering the jailbreak event in 2011, though the page itself was not complete in the WBM.

Besides news outlets, an important aspect of Reddit.com web historiography is the existence of a Reddit-created archive, as well as specific subreddits dedicated to archiving user posts that have been deleted by mods. The Reddit Archive and the subreddit, “/r/undelete”, can be seen below and should be considered in future documentation efforts. Figure (M) and Figure (O).

References

• Alfonso, F., III. (2021, May 31). Reddit bans infamous forum about beating women. The Daily Dot. https://www.dailydot.com/news/reddit-beating-women-banned/
• Allen, Matthew. “What Was Web 2.0? Versions as the Dominant Mode of Internet History.” New Media & Society, no. 2, SAGE Publications, July 2012, pp. 260–75. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444812451567
• Arceneaux, N., & Weiss, A. S. (2010). Seems stupid until you try it: press coverage of Twitter, 2006-9. New Media & Society, 12(8), 1262–1279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809360773
• Helmond, A., & van der Vlist, F. N. (2019). Social Media and Platform Historiography: Challenges and Opportunities. TMG Journal for Media History , Volume 22 Issue 1, 6–34. https://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.434 Morris, K. (2011, October 10). Reddit shuts down teen pics section. The Daily Dot; https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/reddit-r-jailbait-shutdown-controversy/ Gillespie T., “Banned Apps, App Stores, and the Politics of Visibility,” in Morris, J. W. & Murray S. (eds.), Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2018, 51–60. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9391658
• Robertson, A. (2015, June 10). Reddit bans “Fat People Hate” and other subreddits under new harassment rules. The Verge; Vox Media, LLC. https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/10/8761763/reddit-harassment-ban-fat-people-hate-subreddit
• r/The_R_Archives. (n.d.). Reddit - Dive into Anything; Reddit.com. Retrieved November 2, 2023, from https://www.reddit.com/r/The_R_Archives/
• UsenetArchives.com. (2023). USENET Archives, Alternative Groups. UsenetArchives; UsenetArchives.com. https://www.usenetarchives.com/index.php?c=alt.&p=7
• Zeavin, H. (2022). “This is Womenspace”: USENET and the Fight for a Digital Backroom, 1983–86. Technology and Culture, Volume 63 Number 3, 634–664. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2022.0104
• Pardes, A. (2018, April 2). The inside story of reddit’s redesign. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/
• O’Reilly, T. (2005, September 30). What is Web 2.0. New Titles. https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a//web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html