Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?

When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?

- ROBERT PECK AND PARESH DAVE

ALYSSA VIDELOCK WAS 11 years old when she started searching for people like her on the internet. What she found, back in the early 2000s, was not at all what she’d hoped for. “Being trans online was not really a thing,” she says. “There was fetish stuff for it, and there were stories about transformation. But it was either porn or … porn.”

So Videlock was especially grateful, about a decade later, when she started exploring Reddit. She was still closeted to her family and friends, and finding a place where she could speak with other trans people kept her sane, she says. On Reddit, trans people had strength in numbers and power against the aggravation of trolls. Through an elaborate system of volunteer moderators, Reddit allows its communities—called subreddits or subs—to cultivate their own rules, cultures, and protections. The subs that Videlock frequented, such as r/asktransgender and r/MtF, were particularly good at fencing out harassment. “It felt like I could make myself known there,” she says.

For Videlock, lurking on Reddit became a prelude to posting every now and then—which ultimately became a prelude to making herself known in the real world, and in 2017 she started to transition. A couple of years later, she tuned in to a video of a trans woman playing piano on Reddit’s live­streaming service, r/pan, and was moved to watch as moderators shot down one vicious comment after another. The spectacle inspired her to become a moderator herself.