Issues Database

Reddit's 2013 year-end blog listed Eglin Air Force Base — a Florida base with a population under 3,000 — as its most reddit-addicted 'city,' an anomaly that drove persistent speculation about coordinated military or government activity on the platform.

Morgan Freeman's April 2013 promotional Reddit AMA drew tens of thousands of participants but was widely panned for terse, low-effort answers, with many users suspecting a publicist was typing the responses.

On 17 July 2013, Reddit removed two of its most prominent and most criticized communities — r/atheism and r/politics — from its default subreddit list, a curation decision that underscored the company's editorial power over what users see.

In June 2013 Reddit banned the entire Quickmeme domain site-wide after r/AdviceAnimals moderators presented evidence that the meme site's owner had used bot accounts to upvote Quickmeme links and bury competitors.

Beyond the widely remembered misidentification of Sunil Tripathi, Reddit's r/findbostonbombers also helped circulate the faces of 17-year-old track athlete Salaheddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaimi, who were innocent spectators splashed across a tabloid front page as 'Bag Men.'

In April 2013 a Reddit user posted a 'Confession Bear' meme claiming to have killed an abusive man and disguised it as an overdose; amateur sleuths named a suspect and San Diego police opened an inquiry, but no crime was ever substantiated and no charges followed.

In December 2013, users coordinating on r/MensRights flooded Occidental College's anonymous sexual-assault reporting form with roughly 400 false reports in about 36 hours, a clear case of subreddit-organized brigading against an external target.

In 2013 the founder and top moderator of r/atheism, 'skeen', was removed by other moderators citing his inactivity, opening the way for sweeping rule changes that split one of Reddit's largest communities.

During an AMA for his side project How to Destroy Angels, musician Trent Reznor answered a fan's question about signing to a major label with a sarcastic 'the wifi on our yacht is having issues' brush-off that went viral.

In April 2013, users of r/MensRights set out to identify the anonymous author of a feminist blog, but misidentified an uninvolved woman — who then received death threats at her school and workplace, prompting Reddit to threaten to shut the subreddit down.

The r/SilkRoad subreddit served as a public discussion hub for users of the Silk Road dark-net drug marketplace; when the FBI seized Silk Road and arrested Ross Ulbricht in October 2013, moderators briefly took the community private over identity-exposure concerns before reopening it.

On 29 August 2012, sitting US President Barack Obama held a Reddit AMA during his re-election campaign — a landmark moment for the platform that briefly overwhelmed the site's servers and legitimized Reddit as a political venue.