In the ever-expanding universe of obsolete sounds, few can compare to the confident yawp of a dial-up modem. Back in the early days, the internet was slow, but we didn’t know it yet. Or at least we didn’t care. And why should we have? The stuff of the web was organic, something you had to plant and then harvest. It took time. Websites popped up like wildflowers. Far-flung enthusiasts found one another, but gradually. Nobody owned the web, and everybody did. It was open, and everything seemed possible. Everything was possible. Maybe it still is.
Strange things are happening online these days. Strange bad, clearly. But also strange good. One unexpected development is that Reddit, long dogged by a reputation for mischief and mayhem, has achieved a kind of mass appeal. If you ask your friends where they’ve been hanging out online lately, you’re likely to hear some of them say Reddit, actually, perhaps with a tinge of surprise.
Reddit’s founders didn’t set out to save the web. College roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian wanted to create a mobile food-ordering service. But their idea didn’t make sense, at least not at the time. It was 2005; the iPhone didn’t exist yet. So they built something else, no less ambitious: a site that promised to be “the front page of the internet.” Reddit was a place to share all manner of memes, photographs, questions, embarrassing stories, and ideas. Users could upvote posts into internet virality, or sometimes infamy. Eventually, they built their own communities, known as subreddits.
For the first decade of its existence, Reddit was not exactly a respectable place to hang out. Like its spiritual cousin 4chan, Reddit was primarily known for, among other things, creepshots, revenge porn, abject racism, anti-Semitism, and violent misogyny. Endearing corners of Reddit existed, but you couldn’t get to them without stumbling over some seriously disturbing material.
Some of that disturbing material is still there if you look for it, but lately, the gross stuff has been crowded out by the good stuff, and more and more people have congregated on Reddit. Last year the company went public, saw a huge swell in audience, and became profitable for the first time in its history. And though its runaway growth slowed last quarter, Reddit says it now has more than 100 million daily users and more than 100,000 active communities.
The joy of Reddit comes from it being simultaneously niche and expansive—like an infinite world’s fair of subcultures, fandoms, support groups, and curiosities. There seems to be a subreddit for everyone and everything. There are mainstream subreddits with popular appeal, such as r/askscience (26 million users) and r/technology (18 million users). But there are also more esoteric forums, such as r/rentnerzeigenaufdinge, the German-language subreddit that’s devoted to context-free photos of retirees pointing at random things. (That group’s stated purpose: Hier bekommen alte Menschen die Bühne, die sie verdienen. “Here, old people get the stage they deserve.”) There’s r/notablueberry, where people share images of berries that are not blueberries, which other people often warn them not to eat. Some subreddits exist just to deliver a punch line, like r/Lurkers, a community with more than 41,000 members in which no one posts anything at all.
Asking someone where they spend time on Reddit opens a window onto their personality that can be surprisingly intimate. Here, I’ll go: I love r/whatisit, where users share photos of confusing objects they encounter; r/Honolulu, which is a mix of island news and extremely local references; r/tipofmytongue, where people ask for help finding or identifying “un-googleable” songs, movies, books, or other scraps of cultural memory; r/metropolis, dedicated entirely to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film of the same name; and r/MildlyVandalised, a place to share milquetoast visual pranks, such as a shelf of World Book Encyclopedias rearranged so their spines lined up to say WEIRD COCK. (Reddit may be less hateful these days, but it is still juvenile.)
There is a subreddit where violinists gently correct one another’s bow holds, a subreddit for rowers where people compare erg scores, and a subreddit for people who are honest-to-God allergic to the cold and trade tips about which antihistamine regimen works best. One subreddit is for people who encounter cookie cutters whose shapes they cannot decipher. The responses reliably entail a mix of sincere sleuthing to find the answer and ridiculously creative and crude joke guesses.
Not everything on Reddit is merely cute, of course. I have lost count of the number of friends who have mentioned to me that they add the word Reddit to their Google searches—a shortcut to the place where they know they’ll find the best information online. Google, once the unsurpassed King of Search, has become hostile to its users, surfacing hilariously unhelpful AI responses (including telling people to eat rocks and glue) and making it woefully difficult to retrieve credible information, even when you know exactly what source you’re looking for. Reddit, by contrast, offers truly specialized knowledge for every need. It provides travel tips to every conceivable destination and practical advice for every imaginable home-improvement project. One friend told me about using Reddit to find the right tension for his tennis-racket strings and the best embroiderer for a custom hockey jersey. And although the wisdom of the crowd is not fact-checked, Reddit’s culture tends to be equal parts generous and skeptical—meaning that good, or at least helpful, information often rises to the top.
Recently, on the r/creepy subreddit, someone posted about having found a tiny skeleton under the floorboards in their house. “Am I cursed for eternity now?” they wanted to know. The top reply came from someone who explained that they were a zooarchaeologist and could therefore be “95% certain this is a mouse skeleton,” and offered to send their own photo of a mouse skeleton for reference. “Hell yeah,” someone else chimed in. “Ask a random question and get an answer from someone who specializes in the exact niche. Amazing.”
How did this happen? How did Reddit go from being a disgusting fever swamp to an oasis of happiness, expertise, exuberance? Excising the most egregious subreddits was the first step, and not an uncontroversial one. Good and necessary free-speech debates followed. But the site has always given its users more control than other major social platforms. Reddit’s moderators are almost exclusively volunteers, and they are power users. They set the rules for the subreddits they run, and they tend to take their job seriously. The subreddit r/AskHistorians has a reputation for being one of the most heavily moderated communities on Reddit—rather than deleting some comments, it seems to delete most of them. If you don’t like that, and there are plenty of people who don’t, you can join another subreddit for history buffs. Or start your own.
On Reddit, it’s people—not the platform—who decide what any one community should be. (Reddit does still ban whole subreddits sometimes, as it did recently with a group posting violent threats.) Even the most ridiculous forums make their expectations known. In the subreddit r/DivorcedBirds, which is for sharing images of birds that “look like serial monogamists,” moderators specify the following: “Please post pictures of birds who look like they are twice divorced (or more!) and an original caption about their backstory.” Also: No photos of “human women”; no art, paintings, or Photoshop; and “no dead birds.”
Giving users this much control over a major social platform is basically unheard-of anymore. It’s a throwback to the early web, when people had to tend to the sites they wanted to be a part of, and it’s a stark contrast to the way other social-media sites have evolved.
Reddit is surging at a time when much of the rest of the social web has curdled. The mainstream platforms are overrun with a combination of bots, bigots, and bad AI, especially because platforms such as X and Facebook have declared that the substance of what people post is of no concern to them. Which is how we got to the point that Reddit, of all places, has developed a reputation as a force for good, or at least a force for reminding people of the promise of a decentralized open web.
The social giants that worship at the altar of megascale—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X—have chosen to do so at the expense of humanity. They train their algorithms to feed people the things that make them angry and afraid and keep them scrolling. Reddit has its own ambitions for exponential growth, but so far it has managed to retain a small-group feeling while still operating at scale.
The question is whether this is a sustainable model. What if this golden moment for Reddit is not a renaissance but a last hurrah—one final reminder of what could have been, before a tsunami of AI wipes out the places that once sparkled with humanity? Reddit recently unveiled its own AI product, Reddit Answers, to the disgust of many of its users. And some long-time users worry that something essential will be lost as normies flock to the platform.
For now, though, Reddit remains wildly original and startlingly generous, which is to say, deeply and gorgeously human. It provides connection to others, stokes curiosity, and—at least in some subreddits—leaves you with a feeling of time well spent, a rarity on other social platforms. Because as different as each Reddit community is, every good subreddit is irrepressibly captivating for the same reason: the people.
Recently, someone posted a question on r/AskReddit: “What have you done on this platform that you’re most proud of?” The answers ranged from earnest to irreverent. People described feeling good about having used Reddit to read more, and to challenge their understanding of the world. Others praised themselves for not posting mean comments when they had the impulse to. One person described having spent two years on a guitar subreddit learning 100 different solos. Another described how they’d posted a cookbook of reverse-engineered Panda Express recipes to the delight of other users (though not, apparently, to the delight of Panda Express). Somebody else felt proud of having taught fellow Redditors how to open a box filled with packing peanuts without making a mess. One wrote: “I’ve been helping strangers with their various math questions for over ten years!” Another: “I make people laugh from time to time.”
What Reddit does, it turns out, is give people a space that they can create and collectively control, and where they can ask one another question after question after question, in every possible permutation. The place is flooded with expertise and genuine wisdom, and it’s filthy with rabbit holes. But the only two questions that people ever really ask on Reddit, if you think about it, are these: Am I alone? Am I okay? And after all these years, in subreddit after subreddit, no matter what the topic at hand is, the same answers keep coming: You aren’t alone. And you might not be okay. But we’re here.
This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Internet Can Still Be Good.”
