After a very lively roundtable on the Australian social media ban for young people at the AoIR 2025 conference, I’m now in a session on Reddit which features many of my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues. We start with Dom Carlon, exploring the evolving trajectory of Reddit as a platform. What is the platform’s sense of identity, and how has this changed over its twenty-year history?
Reddit has shown remarkable staying power and has a unique position in the AI-infused Internet economy of today. It started in 2005 in pursuit of its mission to be ‘the front page of the Internet’; it is mainstream and centralised as a platform, but also very decentralised in its internal structure. In 2005 it still consisted of a single landing page, and porn content featured quite strongly here; this led to the creation of the first, /r/nsfw subreddit.
Over subsequent years, it set up various other themed subreddits, and by 2008 it allowed users to create their own subreddits. Within the first day alone, some 230 new subreddits had been created. This marked the beginning of a new era of active participation on the platform, and of the emergence of new norms and expectations within the Reddit community. There are now some 3.5 million subreddits, and some 100,000 of them are really active. This also meant a shift away from the idea of being the ‘front page of the Internet’, which became an antiquated image – as of three years ago, the new slogan was ‘dive into anything’, emphasising user choice and personalisation.
Reddit and its community continue to discuss and question the platform’s role and mission in the world, though. This has also been driven by Reddit founders and CEOs; in 2012 CEO Yishan Wong described Reddit as a city state stewarded by the company’s leaders; by 2023 co-founder Alexis Ohanian thought of it instead as a convention centre with an infinite number of rooms – a less civic and more commercial metaphor that also leaves open the possibility of Reddit deciding that some groups are not welcome here.
In 2025, Reddit repositioned itself again as ‘the heart of the Internet’: a place for authentic human connection that stands apart from the toxicity and inauthenticity of other social media platforms. This also makes it attractive as a source of training data for AI companies, and creates a need to keep out excessive inauthentic accounts and content. Reddit operators believe that this also requires more facilities for participants to prove that they are human rather than automated accounts. Unusually, such company policies are being discussed in public with the platform operators on the platform.
