Issues Database

In October 2011 Reddit closed r/reddit.com, the site's original catch-all community, and expanded its curated default subreddits to twenty—an under-recognized governance shift that put admins in charge of what the front page, and Reddit's culture, would become.

In October 2011 Reddit shut down r/jailbait, a community built around sexualized images of minors, after a CNN 'Keeping Them Honest' segment and an incident involving solicitation of illegal images — the platform's first major child-safety reckoning.

For roughly three years Reddit hosted r/jailbait, a community trading sexualized images of underage girls, before public pressure forced its closure in October 2011.

In 2010 a Reddit campaign urging Stephen Colbert to hold a rally spun off a charity drive for DonorsChoose that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in days — an early, defining demonstration of the community's capacity for organized goodwill.

Digg's disastrous August 2010 'v4' redesign alienated its power users, who staged a 'Quit Digg Day' and fled en masse to Reddit — a migration credited with helping Reddit overtake its older rival as the dominant social-news site.

In early 2010 Reddit erupted over 'Saydrah', a prominent moderator revealed to work for a content company while moderating communities her employer's material could appear in — an early reckoning over undisclosed conflicts of interest and power-user influence.

For over a decade Reddit had no usable mobile app of its own, so a cottage industry of independent developers—Alien Blue, Apollo, Reddit is Fun, Sync, BaconReader—built the mobile Reddit millions used, until Reddit's 2023 API pricing wiped the ecosystem out.

Reddit launched in June 2005 out of Y Combinator's first class and grew into 'the front page of the internet' on a near-absolutist free-speech ethos that would later collide with hate, harassment and child-safety scandals.