January 4, 2026 - 4:00pm
It appears that Gen Z is not just nostalgic for the fashion trends of the early 2000s, but the internet ones too. Reddit, the online discussion platform, has now overtaken TikTok as Britain’s fourth most visited social media service. The platform has grown significantly in the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches.
This is in part due to search engine algorithms, which now prioritise helpful content from discussion forums, but also shifting internet habits in young people: Reddit is now the sixth most visited organisation by UK users aged between 18 and 24, up from 10th a year earlier. I started using it for the first time last year, finding humour and helpful advice while scrolling late at night in the newborn trenches.
In many respects, Reddit’s growing popularity should come as a surprise. It is utilitarian, unaesthetic and decidedly unglamorous. It prioritises text-based information over video entertainment. It is much more “old-fashioned” in that it resembles the small, community-run forums of the early internet, dedicated to communication rather than content creation.
Yet these are also precisely the reasons why it may appeal to a younger audience. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Reddit is the worst form of social media except for all the other forms that have been tried. Instagram mixes self-promotion and brainless short-form videos; Facebook is full of outrage and misinformation; and Twitter/X, once the “digital town square”, is now like a school playground where the bullies and bots have taken over. All three have become a concentrated sludge of conspiracy theories, violence, porn, spam, trolls, scams and AI.
Reddit, on the other hand, still feels human. Users follow general topics of interest rather than people. Comments are confined to individual subreddits, so there’s little impetus to come up with the most extreme or controversial take. There’s also none of the incessant drone to like, follow or subscribe that you find elsewhere. Everyone is anonymous, so there’s no need to worry about one’s “personal brand” or appealing to the algorithm, and attacks are less likely to be deeply personal as a result.
There are also multiple layers of moderation. There are Reddit admins (platform-level staff who handle site-wide policy enforcement); automatic moderating tools; volunteer moderators; and then the users themselves, who are able to upvote and downvote comments, making them more or less visible. They aren’t perfect — unpaid moderators are overworked, and many believe they are inconsistent or too heavy-handed — but these human-centric layers of protection make Reddit feel remarkably more “safe” than the Wild West of Meta or X. Just this week, Elon Musk’s AI “Grok” was criticised for allowing users to digitally undress photos of women without their consent.
While the site is hardly free of bots, Reddit’s growing success is a timely reminder that people want human-generated information, advice, reviews and opinions. Big Tech is constantly looking forward — consider Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with creating the Metaverse, a world that no one really asked for and no one really wants. Perhaps it should start looking back to the past.
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