Where else but Reddit would you find a group of people helping to decode a cryptic message left in a UPS tracking history? That’s r/UPS, a twenty-seven-thousand-member “unofficial community where people can discuss and ask questions regarding UPS related topics.” Where else would I find a moment-to-moment curation of the world’s Formula 1 news? That’s r/formula1, which tops out at nearly three million users. Reddit’s users are, by design, siloed into special-interest communities (“subreddits”), the vast majority of which are characterized by a wholesome enthusiasm and rigorous adherence to the group’s self-imposed set of rules. There is little professional networking to be done self-promotion is often strongly discouraged by the scrupulous moderators of most forums. With its rudimentary interface and its deëmphasis on images, there are no aspirational aesthetics to absorb, no opportunity to broadcast an idealized version of anything. (Advance Publications, the company that owns The New Yorker, is also the majority stockholder of Reddit.) And, even as the site has begun regulating its content more strictly, the Reddit founder Steve Huffman has stood by his decision to allow (hugely popular) pornographic forums to remain on the site. There’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to “controversial Reddit communities.” The list is neither short nor pleasant. Even when Reddit wasn’t being used as a water cooler for frustrated misogynists, the site had a reputation for a kind of mischief that could congeal into insurgency, like the meme-stock movement that sent GameStop soaring for a couple of frenzied weeks in early 2021. The incel community was known to congregate on Reddit and spew threatening language and violent ideas about women-so much so that, in 2017, the site disbanded r/incels, a group with more than forty thousand members. After all, it was Reddit-along with 4Chan-where conspiracy theorists and online abusers gathered to orchestrate a harassment campaign against women in the world of video games. I first understood Reddit as the stomping ground of mobs of angry young men who seemed to be on the wrong side of the culture wars. In the crumbling ecosystem of social-media platforms, Reddit’s reputation has been overshadowed by a handful of headlines. I hope that its developers never bother to update its code to facilitate more image-based posting. This proclivity for writing has, over time, turned Reddit into the most utilitarian, information-rich Web site on the Internet. There’s even a network of beloved storytelling-driven Reddit forums that classify themselves as “text-only”: over on r/talesfromretail, for example, retail workers can regale nine hundred and eight thousand Reddit users with horror stories, advice, or reports of heartwarming exchanges with customers. This means that users usually default to communicating in writing, in a way that is more nuanced-if sometimes more long-winded and pedantic-than on any other platform. On Reddit, character limits on posts are high, and the mechanism for adding an image to a post is cumbersome. Today, according to Semrush, an Internet metrics tracking company, Reddit is the fifth most visited Web site in the United States, but its rudimentary interface and its blunt functionality hark back to a more innocent era of online communication. One such stronghold is Reddit, the expansive network of discussion forums founded by a pair of graduates of the University of Virginia in 2005. Those streaming shows are most successful when they generate GIFs and memes for social media.Īnd yet, amid the digital sea of reels and shorts and TikToks, there are a few unexpected strongholds of written communication. Books are chiefly useful insofar as they generate source material for podcasts or streaming shows. On a bleak day, the signs are everywhere. The continued diminishment of the written word is such a foregone conclusion that it’s almost not worth getting sentimental over. Encapsulating a complex group social dynamic with an apt screenshot from a popular movie is almost as satisfying as composing a nice turn of phrase. Responding to a message with a series of emojis has come to feel more natural than offering a thoughtful explanation. To a writer, there is something obviously unsettling-in a Darwinian sense-about the relative ease of using images instead of words. This element of “Super Sad True Love Story” has stuck with me for over a decade, a period during which written communication has ceded more and more ground to images. New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
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