I would never voluntarily go around identifying as a “Redditor.” 

But recently, I noticed Reddit was flagged by my browser as a “site you visit often.” At first, I half gasped, half grimaced in quiet horror. It was true, I had, by some misfortune, earned the title of a Redditor. I had looked too extensively into threads exploring storyline paths in a video game I’d been playing, gone too far in my Pokemon cutscene music deep-dives, a niche I can only indulge in on Reddit. But really, what was so wrong with consulting the little orange-eyed alien? When I was torn between laptop models, I turned to Reddit. In the face of a crisis regarding my college application, Redditors came to my rescue. A helpful thread from nearly a decade ago helped me repair my record player. 

Historically, Reddit is a platform of degeneracy, largely stained by its unregulated, uncensored nature. At best it was an echo chamber of subcommunities run by incels posting derogatory content. At worst, it was a hellhole of rampant misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, of vile expressions of bigotry parasitically attached to its core user base. But in the hidden corners, the nooks and crannies, you can genuinely find honest, helpful, fun communities of people.

In recent years, as stricter platform-wide restrictions have been established, more and more often, I see people online proclaiming their love for Reddit, the weird, yet fascinating corners of the forum-style platform where internet nomads may seek advice for extremely specific situations they’re in, stumble into niche fandom discussions, share funny or embarrassing stories, and discover enthusiasts for anything and everything. 

In the mainstream, Reddit is presented much like a confessional booth, with r/AITA (Am I the Asshole?), a subreddit made in 2013 with more than 24 million users (self-described “Potential Assholes”) dedicated to sharing stories ending with the aforementioned question, awaiting moral evaluation from strangers online. The platform is best defined by its anonymity and lack of censorship, allowing users to speak candidly, sometimes with remorseless, blunt judgement, but also, really, without anything to lose or gain, participating in discussions out of pure intrigue.

Knowing all too much about strangers on the internet undoubtedly has its downsides, but it also works as a reminder that we all have some urge to know even the most secret parts of ourselves would be accepted, or even shared by someone else out there. Unlike most social media platforms, Reddit’s norm is anonymity. There are no introductions, no expectation to find people you know, curate a picturesque look into your life, rather, it’s the opposite — there’s no performance to it, which restores some childlike wonder the web has lost.

These days, online communities have not just lost their sincerity, but their fun. It’s hard to post anything without careful intention, open any comment section with completely unprovoked hostility, traverse any website without someone tapping you on the shoulder, trying to sell you something you absolutely don’t need — the internet lost the artless charm it once had, when I remember surfing, not drowning in the web. 

Reddit’s beauty is that it truly embodies the vastness of the internet, but still, the tiny, endearing communities are everywhere you look.

When I crave low-commitment,  innocuous fun facts, I visit r/mildlyinteresting, a subreddit dedicated to sharing the most mediocre of content, from photos to fun facts to experiences. One user shared a photo of when they “Poured olive oil into a pan and it formed an almost perfect square,” another user documented eating a spherical hashbrown, posts most logically deemable as just “mildly interesting.” 

Sometimes, I peek into r/nottheonion, sharing real headlines that are sadly, not The Onion: “Military to remove ‘Enola Gay’ photos for violating DEI rules” or “Texas lieutenant governor moves to rename ‘New York strip’ steak to ‘Texas strip’”.

And when I’m feeling really adventurous, I’ll go to r/breadstapledtotrees, which, I’m sure you can deduce from the name, offer me some pretty bizarre images. 

But Reddit isn’t just useful for some silly pick-me-ups. More than that, Reddit is reliable. Kind of. Of course, you shouldn’t trust everything a stranger tells you online, but when you need advice on finding the best affordable laptop model to buy, if you have a suspicious, unexplainable pain in your shoulder, if you need help finding a movie you remember the plot but not the title to, if you need a brutally honest, spoiler-free review of a show you’ve been meaning to watch, look no further than Reddit. 

In the world of automation, of increasingly suspicious AI-generated Google answers, of sponsored websites, which might not give you the answers you need but paid enough to pop up first on the page, now more than ever, we need the richness of human answers, experiences, insights.

So strangely, Reddit might just be crucial. But at the same time, I don’t find any of this strange at all. What does AI know about fixing a CD player’s eject function that Rob from 6-some-years-ago doesn’t? There is no wonder as to why, I trust the Reddit platform with my qualms. I know why — we trust each other. Our instinct tells us to look around and ask, to start conversation, to consult another human in times of distress over any algorithmic search engine. 

As we become increasingly numbed by social media, as the internet grows more hostile, more distant, than ever, as compassion sours into apathy, as neoliberalism traps us in the false promises of an individualist society, Reddit becomes the last bastion of true community that prospers on the internet. 

However, I find the principles that Reddit stands on are necessary in real life, too. I am entertained by how fascinating and creative people can be, how absurdly similar a stranger’s situation is to mine, how inclined I am to want to help people I don’t know. Reddit itself is oxymoronic — a community of strangers. But it necessitates the reminder that we are not alone, there is familiarity everywhere we wander, it tells us to make ourselves a little less alien to each other.

So I’ll keep turning to my fellow humans. I’ll ask a stranger for advice because they might have gone through the exact same situation as I did. I’ll enrich my life learning from somebody nerd out on a topic they’re passionate about. I’ll reach out because today’s reality is too lonely to not acknowledge the silly fact that we’re all just bumping shoulders, waiting to fill the silence before we reach our stop.