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?
But over the past few years, this manosphere-adjacent corner of the web has had a bit of a reputational makeover. Reddit bosses outright removed plenty of offensive subreddits rather than just banning specific users. And they introduced automated moderation processes, to help assist the community moderators (essentially volunteers who police each subreddit) in digging out bad behaviour.
In an era when many social media giants take a pretty hands-off approach to content moderation, Reddit seems to have provided a lesson in how to tighten things up without eroding the site’s personality. What is particularly striking is the fact that Reddit is now the fastest growing social platform for women in the UK; over here and in the United States, women currently account for more than 50 per cent of its users. The site is now fourth-highest-reaching social platform in the country, ahead of TikTok, and over 116 million people used the site globally last year. Half of its 30 million UK users were women.
Nicole Heard, the site’s regional lead for the UK, Nordics, Netherlands, Canada and Australia, recently suggested that many women now see Reddit as a “vital collective handbook for navigating day-to-day life” – and I’m now one of them. Although I’m a “lurker” - someone who reads the forums – rather than a “poster”, I’ve found the site to be a surprisingly solid source of advice, and a much-needed corrective to the overly glossy highlights reels endemic to almost every other social platform.
My gateway to Reddit? Adult acne. Last summer, my skin seemed to declare war upon me with the worst outbreak of spots I’ve ever experienced. Attempting to remedy it took up vast swathes of brain space and emotional energy; there is something deeply dispiriting about being in your mid-thirties while still grappling with a skin condition that’s synonymous with teenagers drenched in Clearasil.
During one of my many late night scrolling sessions attempting to track down some miracle cure, I found myself on the Reddit thread r/SkincareAddiction. Subreddits like this one ended up as one of my most valued sources for advice, filled with frank and honest reviews about the purported wonder products being touted by influencers, and progress pictures that felt authentic, rather than uncannily AI-generated.
Hearing about the experiences of others in the same situation was a salve, too (reading the responses to one popular post – headlined “Having adult acne is so humiliating” – felt so validating, it nearly made me cry). Reddit also encourages its users to be anonymous, glorifying in the kind of usernames teenagers made up for chatrooms in the 00s, which means that users tend to pour their hearts out in a way you don’t necessarily see on other platforms, where the emphasis is more on peacocking and posturing.
The anonymity also means it’s a goldmine for advice on the stuff that can be difficult to chat about, whether that’s a relationship problem that feels too fraught to bring up with your partner, or a friendship struggle that you can’t raise with mates for obvious reasons. Reddit provides a salutary lesson in the fact that if you’re having a problem, someone else has probably been there before.
Users tend to pour their hearts out on Reddit in a way that you don’t necessarily see on other platforms
When modern dating can feel like a minefield, reading about scenarios eerily similar to the ones you’re living out can be very validating indeed (a bit depressing, too, but mainly validating). And yes, there’ll be a few sarcastic or bad faith comments, but most of the responses seem heartfelt, optimistic and understanding (pretty much the opposite of anything you’ll consume over on Elon-era Twitter/X).
As a woman in her forties, Alison Johnston acknowledges that she is “probably not [the] usual type” of Reddit user, but she is in fact an early adopter, having been on the platform since 2010. As the owner of a marketing agency, she has discovered it is a good source of business guidance. “The culture is not to push your services, so it’s often very honest and helpful advice,” she says. And, like me, she has found it “great for product recommendations such as where to get the best red light therapy mask”.
What she finds most helpful is the way users will generally “fact check, ask for proof or sources, downvote or question anything which seems odd”, which, in the age of AI content, can provide an important sense check. “I like getting people’s takes on things, hearing directly about their experiences, rather than having that digested for me,” she says.
Kat Rodway, who works in digital marketing for First Internet, says she gravitates to Reddit “largely for the honest discussion – it’s one of the few platforms where people still feel genuinely unfiltered”. During pregnancy and while navigating the newborn stage, she would use it “almost like the new Mumsnet”, as well as “for beauty and skincare research to get real-life opinions rather than polished recommendations” (this one feels like a recurring theme).
And for me, at least, perhaps what’s most heartening is the knowledge that whatever curveball life lobs at you, there’s most likely a sympathetic online space filled with people who are managing exactly the same situation. Last year, I ended up having to simultaneously navigate a pretty spectacular ghosting while also grieving a much-loved family member. It was an emotional double whammy that I wouldn’t wish on anyone – and while I wasn’t exactly thrilled to see that other users on the r/ghosting subreddit had faced a similar grief/ghost combo, I did feel reassured to read how they’d got through it. I’ll never know who those people were, but I’m glad they shared their stories.
Of course, no social media platform is perfect. Unfortunately, there will probably always be trolls; if you dig deep into its recesses to look for, ahem, less wholesome topics, I’m sure that you can find them. But as one of my wise friends puts it, “it’s actually a really great space if you carefully curate what you look at”. Her favourite subreddits? The ones dedicated to The Archers and to Bravo reality shows like Real Housewives. Women contain multitudes, after all.
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