Six percent of American adults who are online say they’ve visited Reddit, which encourages its online community to submit links to stories, photos and other Web postings, then vote them up or down, according to survey results released Wednesday.
The report by the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life project, Pew’s first study of Reddit as a stand-alone platform, found that the site is most popular among younger men, with more than 18 percent of male respondents saying they’ve visited the site, compared with 5 percent of female respondents of the same age. The gender divide holds throughout all age groups, though the number of people who say they visit the site drops significantly in older age groups, the study said.
As the site, founded in 2005 by University of Virginia classmates Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, and sold to Conde Nast in 2006, has evolved, so have its uses. And it should be no surprise that Reddit’s foray into social networking would follow in the footsteps of its bigger competitors — Facebook and Twitter — to also become a forum for political action and for tapping into the flow of wider online discussion.
Politicians and activists have used it to gin up grass-roots support. In 2012, the site welcomed President Barack Obama to participate in an open question-and-answer session, which the community calls “Ask Me Anything.” In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, Reddit users submitted their hypotheses about the bombers after combing through images and footage of the marathon, a move that drew some criticism. When some news outlets reported the user hypotheses as if they were genuine law enforcement tips, Reddit general manager Erik Martin publicly apologized for the role the site played in what he called “online witch hunts and dangerous speculation.”
