It was sometime in August 2014 when I got my first taste of Reddit. It was one of those hot, slow Fridays when the torrent of emails slows to a trickle and the office is populated by empty chairs. I can’t now remember how I found myself on Reddit, but what started as an idle hour quickly became a full-blown addiction.

This was at the height of the Ebola epidemic and apocalyptic media reporting was turning a humanitarian crisis in West Africa into an existential threat for the Joneses. As I was working with the then honorary general secretary of the Society for Applied Microbiology, an expert on infectious diseases and antibiotic resistance, I pitched to him the idea of doing an online Q&A (more specifically, an AMA) on Reddit.

And the rest, as they say, is r/history.

Wait… what’s Reddit?

For the uninitiated, Reddit is a social content aggregation website and the self-styled “front page of the internet”. In many ways, it lives up to its billing, creating a live, evolving snapshot of the most popular online content from across the web. Reddit has over 234 million members and gets over 8 billion page views per month. Eight. Billion. Its members (known as redditors) represent almost every nation on earth.

Reddit’s mission is “to help people discover places where they can be their true selves, and empower our community to flourish”. It’s a complex place where your faith in humanity can be restored, destroyed and rebuilt again in the space of minutes.

You can witness a thousand small acts of kindness between complete strangers, self-righteous moralising, cruelty, silliness and any casual “ism” you wish to mention. But despite the endless puns and self-indulgences, it is generally an earnest, generous place where people genuinely want to help each other.

A galaxy of online communities

Reddit is made up of nearly 900,000 communities (subreddits) organised around almost any topic you could imagine… and some you wouldn’t want to. Anyone can set up a new community, start sharing content and interact with other subscribers.

These communities post and discuss content from around the internet, including university news, academic comment pieces, and even academic papers, connecting relatively niche content with an enthusiastic audience. Many also host open Q&As with researchers on specific aspects of their work.

If you’re searching for a niche, active online community look no further. Some of the more idiosyncratic include r/MonksLookingAtBeer and r/CatsStandingUp, while many directly relate to academic disciplines, like r/history, r/philosophy, r/politics, r/economics.

Because science

Reddit is obsessed with all things science and technology. Elon Musk is their god.

Its most popular dedicated science community (r/science) has over 12 million members – and strict contributor rules to maintain a serious tone. All posts must include references and links to trusted sources and academic publications. It dubs itself The New Reddit Journal of Science.

The combined membership of the top three science subreddits weighs in at over 20 million. Throw in tech, gaming, futurology, space and engineering and you have over 50 million Stem-loving redditors.

Ask Me Anything

Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions give celebrities and experts the opportunity to engage redditors in an informal, time-limited, question-and-answer session. Reddit has hosted everyone from Barack Obama to Bill Gates, a vacuum cleaner repair man and Steven Hawking.

While Obama’s AMA ended up being a bit bland, the experiences and knowledge shared by the vacuum repair man made it one of the most popular and memorable AMAs ever hosted.

Q: What is the weirdest thing you have ever found inside of someone’s vacuum?

A: Mostly, bullets. I mean, WTF people?? I’ve also found: snake eggs, gecko eggs, a desiccated toad, and four mouse pinkies, also desiccated.

Each day, the moderators at Reddit’s science subreddit provide the chance to interact with academics from the sciences and social sciences. These closely monitored, good-natured Q&As draw in redditors from a wide range of backgrounds and can generate many thousands of questions and comments.

They are free and easy to organise. Not only that, but they generate comments and statistics that act as a permanent record of the interactions. Not bad for a few hours and zero pounds invested.

At a time when the value of “experts” is being openly questioned, and researchers are under increasing pressure to engage with the public and demonstrate “impact” on the wider world, AMAs provide an opportunity for a genuine dialogue with a huge public audience.

I love it when you call me Big Data

The most recent AMA I organised included a link to an online test designed to identify so called “super-recognisers”, people at the very top of the facial recognition spectrum.

Within 24 hours of posting, over 16,000 people had taken the test, significantly more than over the entire span of the study. This data has the potential to radically alter our understanding of this area and will directly lead to academic publications.

The genius of the crowd

Reddit is both testament to and stark warning of the dangers of crowd sourcing. Infamous for its potentially deadly contribution to the Boston Marathon bomber manhunt, its members also intervene to catch vandals, provide sports equipment to the disadvantaged and send pizza to kids with cancer.

Fundamentally, it’s this positive (if at times misguided) collective will that makes Reddit such a powerful platform for a range of potential academic engagements with the public.

There’s gold in them thar hills…

There have been recent examples of innovative, non-academic projects on Reddit that could open a door for researchers in the arts and humanities.

On April Fool’s day 2015, a Reddit administrator started an online social experiment called The Button. It featured an online button and a 60 second countdown that reset each time the button was pressed. When the countdown reached zero the experiment ended – but it didn’t for over two months.

Each participant was assigned a colour depending on when they pressed the button, which quickly led to the creation of factions with rich (and often amusing) micro-cultures, rules and behaviours.

Reddit has also become a popular destination for innovative, interactive fiction. Aside from its hugely popular horror fiction community (r/NoSleep), the so-called Interface Series has generated national news coverage for its innovative approach to storytelling.

But watch out for dragons

Fundamentally, Reddit embodies many of our hopes and fears about the internet. While vast, it crystallises the unnavigable cosmos of information (and misinformation) that is the web into self-organising and moderating special interest communities.

It reflects much of the good and bad of the wider web and its huge potential for academic engagement should be embraced, but with caution: there’s the vanilla version of Reddit represented by the “front page” – cute animals, funny gifs, people sharing advice, movie trailers and the latest scientific discoveries. But there is also a darker side frequented by communities we cannot name.

Reddit, like much of the internet, is a huge public space that we experience in a very private way. It’s a reflection of the best and worst of humanity, and it creates ways of behaving and interacting too. Reddit is not neutral, and needs to be approached with the same care and respect you would extend to any group or community you want to work with IRL (in real life).

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