Pop Culture Confessions: Reddit

Perhaps my scariest admission yet

I’ve come clean about liking a lot of shameful things here in the past.

After all, it’s kind of the point of Pop Culture Confessions. Over the past year, I’ve confessed my love for all manner of questionable content.

Pop Culture Confessions is a place where I break down the media I love but feel weird (or worse) about. I’ll give myself the space to fangirl while also being transparent about my ambivalence (or worse) and how I might be able to untangle it.

But I’m not sure I’ve ever been as scared to admit something as I am here today.

Today is the day I tell you about my relationship with Reddit.

It started (truly) from an honest place. A place of research and necessity.

I won’t bore you with too many details about my novel here, but for the purposes of this post, I can tell you that it’s a peek into the fascinating (I think) crossover between megachurch culture and the influencer economy. Since I’m not personally involved in this world, I took the research process seriously. The idea for the book came from a social media rabbit hole I fell into during peak pandemic lockdown, but I wanted to do the content justice by learning as much as I could.

In defense of falling down an online rabbit hole

This required learning about New Testament Scripture, watching hours of megachurch sermons, and getting acquainted with a certain group of influencers to such a degree that I often felt overwhelmed with empathy and appreciation for them.

In the course of this research, though, I discovered a little something called snark culture, which is especially prevalent on—you guessed it—Reddit. For the uninitiated, snark culture is basically the practice of of commenting about public figures in a sarcastic, critical way. I’ve learned that there’s quite a spectrum when it comes to snark, and I’m absolutely disgusted by discourse that crosses a line into bigotry or hate speech. But there’s a particular variety of online snark that offered a helpful additional layer for my book research… and I kind of got hooked on it.

Let me be perfectly clear: I am exclusively a lurker on Reddit. I have never posted there and don’t plan to.

Still, snark boards have over time claimed a piece of my routine (and maybe my heart).

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Currently Reading: Social Engagement by Avery Carpenter Forrey

There’s a lot going on in this book. It’s part sparkly examination of modern social media and wedding culture, part creepy peek into one woman’s extremely dark thoughts. I’m still not totally sure where it’s going so I may need to circle back, but I am absolutely stunned by how beautiful the writing is. It’s some of the best prose I’ve read in a long, long time.

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Before I further bare my soul about this, let’s do a quick Reddit run-down.

Here’s what you need to know about the platform…

• Founded in 2005, Reddit is a social network that functions broadly as a forum for all kinds of discussion. Its simple aesthetic is reminiscent of old school AOL message boards, and it organizes content into subject-specific subreddits. Within those “subs,” users can post and react to relevant messages. Posts are upvoted or downvoted to reflect the community’s opinion. Those metrics, as far as I can tell, have different weight in different subs, but they also dictate what content is seen at the top of any page within the network.

• Subreddits are moderated by volunteers who create and enforce community rules. Like all online spaces, Reddit can get ugly. It’s up to mods to limit that by holding groups accountable to the codes of conduct they have to read when they join any given subreddit. The company has attempted to turn down the temperature on negativity further by releasing annual reports that detail how many posts have been taken down and why, as well as how law enforcement agencies have engaged with the site.

• As of this year, Reddit is the ninth most-visited website in the world. Woah.

Clearly, I’m not the only one with a Reddit habit.

Let me tell you a little more about what that looks like and why I have such complicated feelings about it.