Not many websites are as polarizing as Reddit. The forum has groups discussing anything as innocent as knitting or TV shows, but also has a dark side – individual message boards, called subreddits, discussing beating women, upskirt shots, and dead people.
The reason Reddit’s dark side seems so much worse is that the website itself is not all bad. In some ways, it’s the nicest (and most grammatically correct) message board I’ve been on.
But the the bad side can unexpectedly come out at any time. Redditors can turn on anyone with little to no evidence.
In 2011, a man lent his Jurassic Park jeep lookalike to Telltale Games to promote their Jurassic Park game. He got it back with $2,000 worth of damage and posted the story on Reddit. He also posted the name of the Telltale employee who was responsible for the jeep’s shipping and, it turns out, had nothing to do with the damage. She was harassed with calls, emails, and Facebook messages while she was trying to enjoy her birthday celebration in Las Vegas.
A woman posted about her rape, and when Redditors found out that she once did zombie makeup, she was accused of faking the claims. She posted a video of her wiping her bruises, which didn’t come off because she wasn’t lying.
Redditors accused Sunil Tripathi of being the Boston bomber. His family dealt with harassing phone calls until his body was found dead in a river for unrelated reasons.
Redditors also accused a young woman of setting up a scam fundraiser for cancer and she was reported to the police and FBI. Turns out she really was trying to raise money for cancer research.
The community as a whole has an overinflated sense of injustice and a tendency towards righteous indignation. They will get up in arms about anything with no evidence – such as the time a Redditor wanted to mobilize the “Reddit army” because he came across a Facebook status seemingly about a lawyer bragging about putting an innocent man in jail. Only he was a law student making a joke about a mock trial.
Reddit regularly displays its sexism and misogyny and is more likely to defend a pedophile than a woman who was raped. I tend to stay out of internet fights and off the top of my head I’ve only contributed on mundane topics: books and food. However, I replied to someone on Reddit months ago saying something to the effect that women are not all catty and can make good friends. Recently, I received seven or eight notifications of Reddit mail. Because of Reddit’s hatred for women, I’m scared to look at the replies, and I had a jolt of fear: what if I’m the next one to get harassed?
What makes these stories even more disappointing is that Reddit has the capacity to be so much more. When they heard about a little girl who was teased for having Huntington’s, they banded together to give her a shopping spree in a toy store. Someone posted a picture of a Kenyan man who took a machete to the face while defending an orphanage, and donated to finish a barrier wall around the orphanage. They raised money to help a toddler with a rare blood disease. If someone posts saying they are contemplating suicide, someone will always tell them they care and tell them where to get help. It can be a caring and altruistic community, but those moments are dwarfed by the overwhelming misogyny, racism, and contempt for anyone who is not a young, white male.
It’s refreshing to be on a message board that is mostly grammatically-correct and sometimes posts have made me laugh so hard I cried. But it’s always there in the back of my mind that I’m an outsider and I have to be very careful about what I say because if I offend the wrong person, the consequences are serious.
I want Reddit to be better than it is because it has so much potential and I don’t want to feel like I’m walking on eggshells whenever I post there. But if I want to spend time on my favourite subreddits, the tradeoff I have to make is knowing that the dark side is out there.
