Allison Geyer
A few of Madison's 9,300 registered Reddit users got together last Saturday in Vilas Park as part of the annual Global Reddit Meetup Day.
On June 13 Redditors all around the world logged off their computers and ventured out into the world to socialize IRL (in real life) for the annual Global Reddit Meetup Day.
Reddit is the massive online community that bills itself as “the front page of the Internet.” It’s an interactive message board with thousands of categories, or subreddits, where the site’s millions of registered users post links and original content. It has exploded in popularity since its creation in 2005 and now draws more than 7.5 billion monthly page views.
There’s a subreddit for virtually every topic imaginable — from cute animal photos to world news stories to tales of “petty revenge” to naked selfies. Posts and comments get “upvoted” if they are constructive and “downvoted” if they’re not.
“Reddit is the place that I simultaneously love and hate,” jokes Chessie Sutherland, a 30-year-old writer who was among the two dozen devotees gathered in Vilas Park on Saturday afternoon. Previous Madison Reddit meetups have drawn as many as 100, but last weekend’s rain may have dampened turnout. They played Frisbee, grilled out and chatted. None were obsessively checking smart phones to see what they were missing in the virtual world.
The Madison subreddit has about 9,300 users, but its readership is likely much greater — the “1 % rule” of Internet culture suggests that for every one user creating content, there are 99 others who simply view it — i.e. “lurkers.”
With thousands of forums to choose from, the Reddit community draws a diverse crowd. There’s a prevailing stereotype that users are basement-dwelling white males between the ages of 18 and 30 who play video games, drink large quantities of Mountain Dew and have a proclivity for fedoras and unkempt facial hair.
“Very few people conform to [that stereotype],” says Jason Ocker, a subcommunity moderator who has helped organize the Madison Global Reddit Meetup for the past several years. “You’ll meet graduate students in engineering and chemistry, people who are artists, people who are into craft beer.... Everybody is going to be different.”
It can be a beautiful place — altruistic Redditors have connected people needing organs with potential donors, talked people out of suicide, helped find lost dogs and committed “random acts of pizza.”
But Reddit also has a dark side. Its members falsely accused a 22-year-old college student of the Boston Marathon bombing. The student was later found dead. The site has birthed a number of communities that promote violent racism, misogyny and general hate speech, and, until recently, has had an “anything goes” policy on what content was allowed.
“We will not ban questionable subreddits,” former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong wrote in a blog post last fall. “You choose what to post. You choose what to read. You choose what kind of subreddit to create.”
Last week, the site broke with tradition, banning five subreddits whose subscribers were engaged in fat-shaming, transphobia, racism and harassment. Some saw it as a much-needed step toward cleaning up the site’s image, but others are calling it censorship and threatening to leave.
“Reddit is a little weird,” says 30-year-old Landyn Record, who joined the site three years ago for the “sweet memes” and now moderates the Madison subreddit. “But it’s grown into a part of my life that I love.”
And sometimes Reddit loves people back. Thirty-three-year-old Amanda Benzine met her husband, Lance, 37, at the first-ever Madison Global Reddit Meetup Day five years ago. They married in 2012.
“It’s amazing how many couples met on Reddit,” she says.
He browses posts about news and credits the site for shifting his political views to the left; she moderates a subreddit about conceiving over age 30.
They now have a 9-month-old son named Korben Dallas, who was the youngest Redditor in attendance on Saturday. By the time next year’s meetup rolls around, he’ll have a sibling.
