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.
It is dead. Say something true about it.
