Reddit Drops r/atheism and r/politics as Defaults

On 17 July 2013, Reddit changed its list of 'default subreddits' — the communities that make up the front page for users who have not logged in or have just created an account, and which therefore dominate what most visitors see. Logged-in users could customize their front page at will, but the defaults determined the experience for everyone else and delivered an automatic stream of new subscribers to the chosen communities. For the first time in nearly two years, Reddit removed two of its most prominent and most criticized defaults, r/atheism and r/politics, replacing them with five new communities including r/books, r/explainlikeimfive (where users explain difficult concepts as though the listener were five years old), r/television and r/gifs, alongside additions such as r/earthporn's landscape photography.

Reddit's announcement, posted by its administrators, was unusually blunt: 'We could give you a canned corporate answer or a diplomatic answer that is carefully crafted for the situation. But since this is reddit, we're going to try things a bit differently and give you the real answer: they just weren't up to snuff.' The post allowed that 'there still ARE good parts about them' but said the two communities had not 'continued to grow and evolve like the other subreddits we've decided to add.'

Both communities had been central to Reddit's rise. r/politics served as a staging ground for Ron Paul's 2008 campaign before degenerating, in critics' telling, into low-effort partisan link-spam, while r/atheism — which counted 2,174,577 subscribers at the time of the change — had become notorious for low-effort image-macro culture. BuzzFeed's John Herrman observed that both had been 'large enough, and historically important enough to the site's users, that they remained in the front-page mix for almost everyone,' and framed the demotion as Reddit doing 'its casual users a service.'

The move was significant because it underscored that Reddit, despite branding itself as a neutral platform, was making editorial curation decisions using metrics such as traffic and subscriber growth — thereby assuming greater responsibility for what it elevated. r/atheism lost its automatic stream of new subscribers, and its growth and front-page prominence declined sharply afterward. Reactions ranged from outrage to relief — the top comment on the announcement thread drew more than 4,000 upvotes — and the episode remains an early, clear illustration of the tension between Reddit's self-image as a hands-off platform and the editorial choices implicit in deciding which communities to amplify.