Cast your mind back a decade or so, and Reddit didn’t exactly have the best reputation. The sprawling online discussion platform was known as one of the more dubious parts of the internet, a haven for trolls and incels. Popular subreddits (online communities dedicated to a particular topic) seemed to celebrate misogyny. There, the manosphere thrived, and so-called revenge porn was just about tolerated until 2015, when it was made illegal.
Reddit essentially felt very much like the dark underbelly of the online world, a vaguely more socially acceptable cousin of grimier, shadowier places like 4chan. None of this, of course, made it particularly appealing to women. Why would we go somewhere with a user base that appeared to actively disdain us?
