Dwindling trust in the media aside, some questions have always been better suited to community outsourcing. Take Yelp, for example. When used in a big city, it’s more reliable than a professional review. By reading through multiple perspectives, you can develop a more complete sense of whether a restaurant, doctor or retailer is worth visiting. Reddit works on the same logic: both sites have such large user bases that there are few topics, experiences, or products about which there haven’t been multiple conversations.

Reddit’s reliability isn’t only due to the number of people who use it. Its pseudonymous nature fosters honesty, allowing users to participate more openly than they might under their own name. This makes it a perfect place to seek support from others, and the site has become a popular online destination for people who want to wean themselves off drugs and alcohol, seek accountability for goals such as losing weight, and, famously, support for quitting masturbation habits.

Rival platforms fall short in a number of ways. Quora has been overrun with low-quality answers and lacks cohesive communities: people tend to drop in occasionally, usually to self-promote. X, on the other hand, suffers from volume, and is more conversational and not organised by topic or question. If Reddit is a forum, X is a chatroom.

It will be interesting to see if and how the platform’s atmosphere and content moderation practices evolve after the IPO. One potential change is that it may start forcing people to log in. In a WIRED article detailing Reddit’s IPO filings, it was reported that, while Google brought the site a considerable amount of traffic, most of the users were logged out and stayed on the site for a shorter period. This means that they were served fewer ads and were less lucrative than logged-in users. Another potential solution is to increase the number of ads presented to logged-out users.

Then there is the matter of content moderation. In the last decade, some users have expressed concern that Reddit’s moderation practices have become overly strict, leading to a noticeable shift in the site’s original character. While the platform once hosted a wide range of controversial subreddits, allowing for more unconstrained discussions on sensitive topics ranging from politics to gender and sexuality, these moderation changes have somewhat limited the scope of such conversations.

Some bans may have been justified, but others were more hotly contested, like the decision to ban /r/The_Donald, a space for fans and supporters of former president Donald Trump. Terms of Service violations were given not just for /r/The_Donald but for all “unjustly” banned subreddits, yet many users still argue these bans were unfair — even draconian — years later.

Luckily, these changes haven’t impacted the majority of online communities, or at least not to the same extent. As Reddit enters a new phase as a publicly traded company, it remains to be seen how it will balance the expectations of its users and shareholders while preserving the site’s diversity. Still, in an age of rapid online advances, of metaverses and vision goggles, it’s reassuring that the old-fashioned message board can still hold firm.

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Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.

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