ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Reddit’s evolution over its first 15 years of existence, focusing primarily on Reddit’s subreddits. It gives a brief description of Reddit’s changing functionality, and then provides a typology of subreddits, categorizing them based on their purposes: “spectacle,” “appreciation, affinity, and fandom”; “the public sphere,” “personal experience, opinion sharing, and conversation”; and “educational,” “creativity,” and “place-based.” The chapter proceeds to chronicle periods in Reddit’s history in which different types of subreddits became popular, using descriptive quantitative analyses to convey growth in particular subreddits over time. It concludes with a summary of the chapter’s findings, noting that the seeds of what Reddit would eventually become were established early in its history.
