What better way to start out a video about Reddit than by going to the front page of
the internet? 'Was very anxious to meet my BF's parents for the first time but this little
guy greeted me at the door.' Oh it's a puppy! Ooohhh!
In 2005 a couple of guys named Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman launched reddit.com and
by 2006 those guys were millionaires because the media conglomerate Conde Nast acquired
it. It became so popular so quickly. When you look at reddit by the numbers it's kind
of astonishing. In 2013 alone, reddit attracted 731 million unique visitors from around the
world who clicked through 56 billion page views. Sppsshhh. This mass of humanity that
came to reddit generated a mass of content including 40.8 million posts, almost 405 million
comments and 3.67 billion--billion!--comment votes. But when you consider who makes up
that teeming community of redditors who generate all of those links and subreddits and responses
to AMAs and upvotes and downvotes you notice a particular masculine pattern. According
to 2012 data at least, 72% of reddit users are men. It's not even become a hackneyed
phrase on the internet that women are from pinterest and men are from reddit. I wasn't
able to find any sort of scholarly research that has been done on the intersection of
gender and reddit. When Ohanian and Huffman launched reddit the point was to put the power
of the website into the hands of the people which is why they devised the upvote and the
downvote so that people could not only determine what content ends up on reddit but what people
actually see. And I have a hunch that that very real user-generated kind of power that
reddit gives to the user is especially appealing to guys. On the good side of things you have
all of these communities that have popped up who are talking to each other and learning
from each other and encouraging each other, AMAs where people are being able to talk to
their idols, the massive secret Santa exchange or the random acts of pizza. And on the flipside
of that you have the not so great side or reddit especially if you are a woman like
me and think that it's a little disturbing to read some of those men's rights activists
comment threads. Unfortunately because of how active and frankly trollish some of those
not so positive reddit communities have become I realize that simply by virtue of being a
woman talking about reddit, it's probably going to annoy some people who don't see it
as my place as a woman to talk about what is there space. That very concern of sexist,
bigoted, discriminatory posts being upvoted and all sorts of awful comments that sometimes
thrive on reddit is something that Alex Ohanian himself has explicitly spoken out against.
In a blog post that he wrote he said, 'The geek has inherited the Earth and now that
we're the powerful ones we need to remember that with great power comes great responsibility.
It's irresponsible to continue to act as though we are the victims.' When Ohanian talks about
his original vision for reddit he realized from the get go how incredible of a community
and how powerful of a community this was going to be and he said, 'I'm motivated by all the
awesome people whose ideas we've never benefited from because of where they were born or because
of their race, sex or other characteristics.' Circling back now to this question of why
reddit appeals so specifically to men, while it's true that according to data from the
United Nations there are more men on the internet than women it's not such a massive gender
gap that would explain reddit being so widely male. Guys I want to know from you. Why do
men love reddit so much? And hey redditors since I know you love a good citation here
are my sources from all that I've been gabbing about. [Singing] Reddit. Oh it's a lot of
men. You can forget it. If you're a woman. Because you'll get shutdown and called a whore
because reddit don't want anymore of your woman talk no, this is a space where guys
can be guys and look at cats too.