REDDIT'S REVENGE

IN AN ERA OF AI UPHEAVAL. THE CACOPHONOUS SOCIAL HUB EMERGES AS THE HUMAN-DRIVEN INTERNET'S LAST GREAT HOPE.

- HARRY MCCRACKEN

"WELCOME TO THE FRONT PAGE OF THE INTERNET." EVERYONE WHO ENTERS REDDIT'S SAN FRANCISCO HEADQUARTERS IS GREETED BY THAT PHRASE, EMBLAZONED RIGHT ABOVE THE FRONT DOOR IN BOLD RED LETTERING. IT'S HOW THE COMPANY HAS DESCRIBED ITSELF FOR YEARS. BUT COFOUNDER AND CEO STEVE HUFFMAN ACKNOWLEDGES THAT IT NO LONGER CAPTURES THE SPRAWLING, 19-YEAR-OLD COMMUNITY SITE'S ESSENCE.

Likening Reddit to a newspaper's front page was originally "an aspirational joke," he tells me. "And then maybe it felt more true than not for a while." That was the mid-aughts when much of the action took place on the site's homepage, a list of links from around the web submitted by users and ranked by interestingness via upvoting and downvoting. The results amounted to a snapshot of what the internet was obsessing about at any point in time.

Today, however, Reddit's 82.7 million daily active users ("redditors") are dispersed throughout more than 100,000 active forums ("subreddits"). Topics range widely: gaming, investing, shopping, teaching, voting, troubleshooting, baking, coding, dating, traveling, gambling, bird-watching, and much, much more. In addition to being a font of practical advice, the site - which gave us internet obsessions such as Grumpy Cat - remains an unparalleled meme factory. Currently, 159,000 people belong to a subreddit devoted to hating on Grandpa Joe, the character from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a surprisingly rich vein of conversation.

Reddit now offers each user a unique experience hyperfocused on their interests - the furthest thing possible from a one-size-fits-all front page. So is there a better way to describe what the site has become? "We often say, "The most human place on the internet,'" says Huffman.