The Tamesis
Once an unregulated corner of the internet reserved for male gamers and web developers, Reddit has become one of the fastest-growing social media platforms of all user groups.
A quick ask in my Whatsapp group and I knew why it appeals to Millennial women. “It is the source of all knowledge and is independent of those who influence it,” said a friend. “I use it because it’s real people and ChatGPT has no soul and makes me sad,” said another. “I love the old-school feel of the platform – it feels completely different from the ads, image saturation and reach,” said a third.
In a world where consumers feel like they’re constantly being betrayed, the platform’s continued growth over the past 20 years is down to its proposition as a more private, trustworthy corner of the internet that feels more authentic than elsewhere, said Reddit COO Jen Wong. It is also becoming the antidote to automated social algorithms and artificial intelligence. “People like the idea that you’re not being influenced by one person or brand like you are on other social media, but rather a group of people offering different perspectives on something they care deeply about and understand,” Huang told me. “As the world moves more towards artificial intelligence and separation from humans, the value of human intelligence becomes even more salient on Reddit.”
Reddit’s annual performance statistics from earlier this month confirmed that feeling. Globally, it grew 19% last year to more than 121 million daily active users, well above Meta’s 7% daily active user growth rate. This growth is distributed across all regions – in the UK alone, Reddit’s monthly active users have grown 88% in the past two years, surpassing TikTok. In the UK and US, Reddit’s surging user base is now more than 50% female, Wong added, with other demographics such as age being split fairly evenly.
“We started from [a] Tech guys are curvy, but now the genders are really balanced. In fact, in the UK and Australia, women are the majority,” she said. “If you look at the last few years, our high-growth areas have been fashion, beauty, TV fandom and parenting – all of those things that are commonplace in life, so there’s no demographic bias overall. “
Staff merchandise from Reddit’s London office.
Reddit has also been a major beneficiary of the explosive growth in artificial intelligence since its March 2024 IPO — albeit incidentally. The large language models (LLMs) that power AI chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on real-world data, making Reddit’s massive repository of real human conversations accumulated since its founding in 2005 an important source of knowledge for companies like OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity as they race to improve their AI products. On the other hand, consumers are increasingly turning to Reddit’s detailed, human-driven subreddits (user-created community pages dedicated to specific topics or interests) as an antidote to these AI platforms.
