a short history of nearly everything reddit

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.

A short history of nearly everything reddit