Like many people who were laid off and house-bound during the Covid lockdowns, I spent an unfathomable amount of time learning an arcane skill that in no way would bolster my CV. Bookbinding was a hobby many of my friends and family were surprised I’d taken up – I wasn’t particularly skilled with my hands, and until then my life had largely revolved around technology and the internet.
I spent hours learning complicated stitching techniques, the chemical composition of adhesives, and how to determine by touch where paper was made. All of my learning took place on a subreddit – a kind of bulletin board or forum on the website Reddit – called r/bookbinding, where a small online community of bookbinders would offer tips and advice on projects I was working on, completely free of charge. In my mind, it was as good as a pricey art school, providing a supportive, enthusiastic community that allowed me to learn the skill at my own pace – and without going bankrupt in the process.
Places like r/bookbinding are increasingly rare in the age of platform-based social media driven by clickbait, algorithmic recommendations and invasive advertising designed to keep us scrolling for ever. The internet used to be full of special-interest forums populated by anonymous users sustaining a niche community, but most have either shut down or are rarely used. It is on Reddit, which started life in 2005 as a link-sharing messaging board, where the last remnants of the forum culture of the old internet remain. But, as it prepares to make its stock market debut this week, opening itself up to corporate investment and further venture capital, such communities are at risk of going extinct entirely.
Reddit currently has more than 70 million daily users who post across tens of thousands of subreddits, organised by subjects of interest. While some of these boards are fairly common and generic – r/politics to discuss current affairs, for example – what most users appreciate is the site’s appeal to niche and irreverent, if not bizarre, interests. Communities such as r/muglife, where members post their favourite cups, r/RateThisMeadow, an ensemble of countryside settings from around the world, or r/Sweetjeans, containing absurd, unsettling images of denim, are only some examples of what makes the site unique.
Reddit is one of the last places on the internet where one might discover something new, without any strings attached.
It’s not to say that Reddit was ever an idyllic place, of course. The platform has hosted subreddits containing racism, misogyny and other forms of hate speech. It also utilises the efforts of uncompensated volunteers, who have contributed to building up its culture and keeping the site functional – a friction exposed last year, when hundreds of moderators shut down their subreddits to protest Reddit’s decision to charge for access to its back-end code.
The relationship between Reddit as a company, and the users and moderators who allow the platform to function, is the source of tension at the heart of the impending initial public offering (IPO). The company will be under far more pressure to prove its commercial value, particularly at a time when interest rates are high and, with a global recession looming, faith in the tech industry is waning. This means that Reddit will probably come up with a strategy to monetise its members. For social media platforms such as Meta and X, this meant flooding their platforms with advertising, often at the expense of user experience. But for Reddit, which is built on the goodwill of users and moderators deeply invested in their own interests and obsessions, such a strategy will be less straightforward.
Any move to commercialise the platform further will require having to decide which subreddits – essentially which communities – are “profitable” and which aren’t. As it courts investment, Reddit will also have to confront users who decide that their work in maintaining subreddits requires financial compensation. Meanwhile, investors in Reddit may feel that any injection of cash would require certain parts of the Reddit ecosystem – particularly those deemed NSFW (not safe for work) – to be shut down or heavily restricted, likely punishing already heavily marginalised communities such as trans people or sex workers.
The impending IPO has much wider implications for the future of the internet itself. As the internet becomes more compartmentalised, directed by large tech companies continuously chasing scale, it has also become more difficult to use. The dominance of advertiser-focused algorithmic feeds mean that even trying to find old friends on Facebook is a near-impossible task, while it is increasingly tricky to avoid the torrents of hate speech from users amplified by paid-for blue ticks on Elon Musk’s X.
Even searching for basic information, from recipes for weekday dinners to local traffic reports on platforms such as Google, is akin to a sisyphean task, where users are expected to dig through mounds of paid-for advertising to find the answer. Of course, all these problems will compound as tech companies, including Reddit, adopt and promote AI tools in the coming years – filling platforms with useless, non-human-generated content with no clear audience or objective, other than to chase clicks and views.
Little wonder that so many analysts of online culture, such as the writer Kyle Chayka, have pointed out that as big money has increasingly encroached into consumer technology, the internet has become less useful to the people who use it – and more importantly, nobody is having fun on it any more. While Reddit’s IPO may make commercial sense, it probably spells the final moments of an internet created by humans with strange and endearing interests, seeking connections and community; one in which people would be willing to teach a stranger a rare, obscure skill entirely for free.
