Reddit and the Digital Public Sphere
A digital public sphere is a contemporary model of a public sphere, which Habermas references as an area of public interest where the people within it seek to gain mutual understanding and create hierarchy within themselves. The three criteria for a space to be fined as a public sphere are a disregard of status among members, a domain of common concern, and the inclusivity of members of all levels of society. The digital public sphere blurs the lines between the content producer and the content consumer. It is for this reason that digital public spheres do not succumb to giving out formal signs of social hierarchy within their platforms. A prime example of a digital public sphere is Reddit.
Reddit is an online forum which gives power to its users. It is a democratic website, where people create the content and also drive the popularity of that content, with the use of a series of up-votes and down-votes. Reddit has millions of subreddits, or topics that people can follow and contribute to based on their interests. Reddit’s user culture places a lot of trust and dependence on the fellow members of its community. The user-driven content is policed by other users, not by major corporations. In essence, there are no limits to what can be published, and people will only suffer consequences based on public shaming by its users. Because of this, Reddit does face issues with its extensive freedom of speech. One example of this would be the subreddit “The_Donald”, which used xenophobic language and threats as an activist attempt to support Donald Trump’s political campaign. Users always maintain anonymity through the use of pseudonyms, because one of the most important aspects of Reddit’s culture is anonymity.
The use of pseudonyms incorporates the disregard of status among its members while also creating an inclusive platform for its members. Compared to platforms like Twitter and Instagram, who verify famous users, granting them a form of “celebrity status”, Reddit’s pseudonym system puts all users on an equal playing field. The use of real-names on social media platforms can immediately place users in a pre-assigned level of digital social hierarchy. Think of celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, who joined Instagram in the last 12 months, who immediately gained millions of followers, simply because of their big Hollywood name. On Twitter and Instagram, social hierarchy comes from the number of likes, but likes are correlated with any given account’s number of followers. Reddit users grant their community members power and status by up-voting or down-voting the responses on any given thread. Pseudonyms also shield many members of the community from identifying demographics like age, gender, and sexual orientation.
Within Reddit lies the creation of subreddits. Subreddits are forums dedicated to specific topics within the reddit community. One can think of them as a type of subculture within the digital public sphere of reddit. Subbreddits create a common concern within specific domains for reddit users. An example of this is the IAmAs. This allows people with uncommon interests to discuss and answer questions about something that plays a central role in their lives. For example, the subreddit IAmAGryffindor allows fans of Harry Potter to discuss the Gryffindor house, the Harry Potter series, and the questions and theories within the fandom. This creates an area of common concern for Harry Potter fans to come together and work towards a common discussion and question and answer process that they can all contribute to with their individual levels of expertise.
All in all, Reddit provides the closest design to a digital public sphere on the internet. It provides a platform for vibrant discussion where users can mask their social identities to create an equal playing field in matters of discussion. It’s non-hierarchical structure proves that the use of personal information across the platform is virtually non-existent. People are free to speak and interpret without question of authority, which can at times be detrimental to the community standard the users try to uphold. Reddit continues to maintain their platform even while facing adversity.
