A community on Reddit with its own name, rules, moderators and flavour of insanity, written r/something. Reddit added the first topic sections in 2006 and let anyone create one from 2008, which is when the site stopped being a link list and became a city of neighbourhoods: r/AskReddit for questions, r/WallStreetBets for regret, r/AmITheAsshole for being told. The word now means any self-governing corner of the internet, and 'there's a subreddit for that' is a sentence that is always true.
Pronounced 'sub-reddit', two words, and written with a lowercase r before the slash. People who say 'a Reddit' mean a subreddit and can be gently corrected once.
I remember when my hobby's subreddit had 400 people and one mod who was also the wiki. Now it has two million and a rule about not posting on Tuesdays. That is the life cycle: village, city, HOA.
Seen during the June 2023 blackout: thousands of subreddits going private in protest at API pricing, and the front page reduced to r/pics posting only John Oliver. The subreddit as a political unit, briefly.
The unit of Reddit. A front page is what happens when a thousand subreddits vote at once; a subreddit is what happens when a few thousand people agree on rules and then argue about them forever. The moderators are unpaid and it shows in both directions.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
