2024-12-03
Reagle, J. (2025). A history of the advice genre on Reddit: Evolutionary paths and sibling rivalries. In First Monday. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v30i2.13729
ABSTRACT: Though there is robust literature on the history of the advice genre, Reddit is an unrecognized but significant medium for the genre. This lack of attention, in part, stems from the lack of a coherent timeline and framework for understanding the emergence of dozens of advice-related subreddits. Noting the challenges of Reddit historiography, I trace the development of the advice genre on the platform, using the metaphors of evolutionary and family trees. I make use of data dumps of early Reddit submissions and interviews with subreddit founders and moderators to plot the development of advice subreddits through the periods of subreddit explosion (2009–2010), the emergence of judgment subreddits (2011–2013; 2019-2021), and the rise of meta subreddits (2020–2023). Additionally, I specify a lexicon for understanding the relationships between subreddits using the metaphor of tree branches. For example, new subreddits might spawn, fork, or split relative to existing subreddits, and their content is cultivated by meta subreddits by way of filtration, compilation, and syndication.
In Newspaper Confessions, Julie Golia draws parallels between advice subreddits and the “History Of Advice Columns in a Pre-Internet Age” (Golia, 2021b). This was to make the past accessible and relevant to contemporary readers. The advice genre remains just as popular as it was in the twentieth century, but many people now engage with it online. Ironically, though, there’s a void when it comes understanding the emergence the genre online, especially on Reddit. I illustrate advice subreddits’ history as the latest chapter of the genre’s history, drawing the familial relationships between subreddits as sometimes friendly, sometimes riven, descendants, and siblings.
Reddit is ranked as one of the top ten websites in the United States, with 22% of Americans reporting visiting the website (Gottfried, 2024). The platform reportedly has 70 million daily active users, with 850 million active every month (Curry, 2025). Reddit’s daily readers are likely on par with the lifetime readerships of “Ask Ann Landers” and “Dear Abby,” around a hundred million each (Anderson, 2002; Robbins, 2022). If any of those millions of Reddit users visit its front page, they will encountered the advice genre there; that is, they will see requests for suggestions (r/relationship_advice), requests to be heard (r/offmychest), and requests for perspective and judgement (r/AmItheAsshole). Regular users will likely encounter subreddits where this content continues to be discussed (r/BestofRedditorUpdates). In 2022, Reddit reported that r/AmItheAsshole was the “#1 most-viewed community on the platform.” As I will discuss, this subreddit was the result of its creators’ question being repeatedly rejected from r/AskReddit back in 2013. And r/AskReddit itself, in 2022, “rose to become the #2 most-viewed community on the platform” (Staff, 2022). This is an example of a successor subreddit overshadowing its predecessor, which we will see more of. It’s also evidence advice subreddits’ popularity: about a dozen of the subreddits I discuss have a million or more members; a few have tens of millions—see figure 1.
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| Figure 1: Creation and size of advice subreddits. |
Additionally, Reddit posts are the subject of syndication across dozens of podcasts, blogs, and video channels dedicated to retelling and discussing Reddit content. Three large podcasts have hundreds of thousands of subscribers: “TwoHotTakes,” “Am I the A$$hole?” and “Reddit On Wiki.” On Twitter, two popular accounts each had around half a million followers—though one stalled when Musk took over. The Youtuber “Mark Narrations” narrates Reddit posts and has 168K subscribers and 180M views. The TikTok channel reddit.stories does the same, with 3.5M followers, but is voiced by a machine. AI narrations of Reddit posts are so popular and low-effort that you can find tutorials on creating your own.
Intriguingly, the emergence of the advice genre on Reddit parallels some of the family dynamics seen among print columnists. Casual readers of advice columns might not know that the two women behind America’s most read advice columns, “Ask Ann Landers” and “Dear Abby,” were twins sisters who were once inseparable—working together on a college advice column, having a joint wedding ceremony, and collaborating on the first “Ask Ann Landers” columns (Kastor, 1986). Also, readers might not know that the sisters would become bitter rivals, that their daughters would follow them as columnists, and that the feud would be carried into the next generation (Landers family feuding reignites, 2002). But the history is there, for those interested. The history of Reddit’s advice subreddits is not. Such work requires reviewing gigabytes of data, interviewing experienced Redditors, and somehow making sense of it all. I present a history of subreddits using the metaphor of a tree, with branches forking and wilting, with some of the same interpersonal dynamics of Ann and Abby. For example, Figure 2 shows a lineage from Reddit’s founding in 2005 to the establishment of r/bestofpositiveupdates in 2022. The lineage entails friendly offshoots and rivalrous splinters, as well as “meta” subreddits that filter, aggregate, and compile posts and comments.
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| Figure 2: Subreddit lineage |
Reddit’s advice subreddits are a major part of the platform and have a significant reach beyond it. The present work traces the lineage and relationships between the top advice subreddits as the latest addition to the advice genre’s history.
Despite the popular significance of advice subreddits, their histories have (so far) been overlooked. There are, however, histories of the company and of specific events on the platform. A journalistic undertaking is We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory (Lagorio-Chafkin, 2018). This book, and many news articles, tell the history of Reddit Inc., from its origins at a “startup accelerator” through its many leadership challenges and changes. Other works touch on history to introduce the community and culture. In Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit, Massanari considers Reddit as “a community, message board, carnival, and play space rolled into one” (Massanari, 2014, pp. 19, 77). There are also hundreds of research reports and news pieces about specific domains (e.g., mental/health, marginalized groups, pop culture, politics, gender, and sexuality) and community dynamics (e.g., moderation and gatekeeping) (Proferes et al., 2021). Each introduces the historical background necessary for understanding the studied phenomenon, but no more.
Only two works substantively attempt to periodize and explain the life cycle of subreddits. Both aptly speak of evolution. In 2013, data analyst Randal Olson published an informal report, “Retracing the Evolution of Reddit through Post Data” (2005–2012). Within its charts, we can see how dominant subreddits wax and wane relative to the growth of the whole (Olson, 2013). A decade later, Elliot Panek, a professor of media studies, claimed that those subreddits “dedicated to broad categories of interest are created first and retain popularity for years to come. Over time, increasingly specific subreddits are created to serve smaller pre-existing niches, affinity groups whose interests were not adequately represented in larger subreddits (often because they were not among Reddit’s initial users), or emergent sub-sub-genres that naturally proliferate as cultures evolve.” According to Panek, there are also some divergences from the typical path. Sometimes, “subreddits with broader designations (e.g., r/gifs, r/videos) are effectively rendered obsolete by more specific subreddits (e.g., r/interestingasfuck).” There are also differences in moderation, prompting a faction to “splinter” from a predecessor. And there are the contingencies of serendipity and timing: perhaps one subreddit’s name is more appealing, and another has a numerical advantage that continues multiplying over time (Panek, 2024).1
Panek’s description of subreddit evolution is apt, though I qualify and extend it by way of a metaphor. I characterize subreddit relationships as akin to branches on an evolutionary tree.
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| Figure 3: Lexicon for subreddits’ lineal relationships. |
Even though Reddit is the dominant platform for the advice genre today, it is missing from histories of the genre. Reddit is recent: its story is one of decades rather than centuries. Also, subreddit minutiae is not as accessible as the biographies of columnists, such as Ann and Abby. That is not to say that Ann and Abby’s stories are easy to keep straight. The twin columnists, shared first and middle names with their order reversed, went by nicknames throughout their lives, changed their last names when married, and eventually took up pen names. As we’ll see, however, some advice subreddits have equally complicated stories. Even so, the history of advice subreddits is necessary to our understanding of the genre in the twenty-first century—and tells stories similar to that of the twin sisters’ sympathies and rivalries.
Finally, there is something implicit in the history of the advice genre and about Reddit itself that merits explication. Scholars typically treat the advice genre as a middle-class (or aspirational), English-speaking, and Anglo-American newspaper phenomenon. Similarly, most journalism and research on Reddit reflect the platform’s American origins and English-speaking user-base. Consequently, the present work has a similar focus and limitation. On Reddit, English messages are estimated to be 97 percent of posts and comments. A few European languages dominate the remaining 3 percent (Hoffa, 2021). For example, law is the only advice topic with a modicum of non-English coverage. Mexico, France, and the Netherlands have legal advice subs in Spanish, French, and Dutch—though they are smaller than those the English-speaking subs for the United Kingdom, Australian, and Canada. In 2024, the platform announced “Reddit is bringing AI-powered, automatic translation to dozens of new countries.” Their plan is for users to be able to read and write in their native language independent of a subreddit’s language (Corporate, 2024). It will be interesting to see how likely this is, and how it might affect advice subreddits.
Reddit historiography is both straightforward and challenging.
For most of its history, accessing Reddit data was straightforward. Olson, for example, was able to “retrace the evolution of Reddit” with data about subreddit popularity from 2005 through 2012 (Olson, 2013). When Reddit put rate limits on queries and removed the ability to search by period, others helped by sharing datasets or provisioning more powerful services, such as Pushshift, based on that data (Baumgartner et al., 2020). A 2021 survey of Reddit research counted 727 research reports thanks, in part, to this openness (Proferes et al., 2021).2 However, that openness is fragile. Following Reddit’s closing of its API is 2023, the Pushshift data service on which much of the research above depended on was shuttered. (It was eventually rebooted, but is only available to moderators on a more limited basis.)
Understanding Reddit as a historical subject is also challenging. The size of Reddit, while amendable to large-scale analyses, is daunting for other types of inquiry (Milligan, 2019). In response to the question of “How big is big?”, the authors of The Joys of Big Data for Historians answered: “For us, as humanists, if there are more data than you could conceivably read yourself in a reasonable amount of time, or that require computational intervention to make new sense of them, it’s big enough!” (Graham et al., 2015).3 Yet, understanding why a subreddit was created and by whom requires human investigation of content that is not easily found.
Unlike a Wikipedia page, for example, Reddit pages do not have a revision history; nor does the website have date-based searching. Consequently, I made use of “data dumps” from Academic Torrents, the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine, Google searches using the “site:reddit.com” facet, and Reddit searches (in order of decreasing utility). I download gigabytes of compressed JSONL-formatted submission data from forty advice-related subreddits; this data often—but not always—included subreddits’ first posts through to 2023. I converted these to parquet files (for performance’s sake) and analyzed them via VisiData, an interactive multi-tool for tabular data (Watchful1, 2024; Pwanson, 2024).
The second challenge is that the data dumps are incomplete (Gaffney and Matias, 2018). Some portions of data were not collected or were collected differently (e.g., different tools and versions, at different times, across changes at Reddit itself). Reddit has also restricted access to its data by removing and rate-limiting types of access. They implemented their most severe restrictions in the summer of 2023 (Corporate, 2023). This prompted a site-wide controversy and the birth of r/BORUpdates, as discussed below. Consequently, I complemented my data investigations with twenty-two interviews with advice-related moderators or heavy users, eight of which are cited in this report. I solicited interviews via Reddit personal messaging (individually or via subreddits’ “mod mail,” which goes to all moderators). I spoke with interviewees via Reddit’s messaging function; three of the included interviews moved to voice conversations, which were transcribed.
Third, while all submissions and comments are associated with a date, subreddit sidebars (descriptions and rules) and wikis (guides and FAQs) are not. I relied on the WayBackMachine for earlier versions of this content, though its coverage is sparse.
Fourth, Reddit has changed its format over the years, leading to inconsistent presentations of
information. Presently, there are three main URLs/layouts with which to engage Reddit:
{old|new|www}.reddit.com. The last defaults to the new layout. Some moderators attempt
to keep them aligned; sometimes, the older information persists and is more informative. When I cite
a sidebar or other subreddit resource, the URL in my reference indicates which version (old, new, or
archived) I noted at the time of access.
The final encumbrance is noted by Reddit scholar Adrienne Massanari: “cultures are messy, slippery, and complicated things that can rarely be summed up in tidy packages” (Massanari, 2014).4 Evidence of this is the Encyclopaedia Of Reddit: An A-Z Guide to Reddit Jargon, History, and Memes. Redditors tried to distill their culture into 743 entries, about seventy of which are abbreviations. Within the “A” section, there are entries for “AMA” (ask me anything), “and my axe” (a Lord of the Rings reference indicating you agree and would help, in theory), and “ate the onion” (when people confuse satire with truth, named for the publication) (llamageddon01 et al., 2024). While this makes Reddit a fascinating object of study, it also makes it harder to follow than an archive of Dear Abby.
How ought researchers use and report public Reddit activity? One position is that public identities and their content, even if pseudonymous, should only be included with permission or under disguise. Another position is that public identities should be treated like authors using their chosen identities. Researchers’ approach is informed by institutional and regulatory requirements, their values, and the research context. This context includes the publicness of the platform, the awareness and savviness of its users, the users’ abilities to disguise their identities and delete their accounts or posts, the sensitivity of their disclosures, and the possible harm from reporting those disclosures in research (franzke et al., 2020).
Reddit is generally known to be public and to be searchable. Redditors are relatively savvy, using pseudonyms, multiple accounts (main, alt, or throwaway), and deleting posts and accounts as they see fit. Savvy users know advice-related content might be syndicated by TikTokers, podcasters, and others (Reagle, 2023). Some advice seekers also post updates, knowing their stories have significant audiences on and offsite—even if they are initially surprised by the attention their post received.
This study is part of a larger project reviewed and approved by the Northeastern University Institutional Review Board (#22-03-45). Sources include research interviews with online users, covered by consent forms and agreement, and data from public online archives, considered “exempt” in IRB parlance. However, the advice genre often includes discussion of sensitive topics. Therefore, I identified criteria by which I would take additional measure to disguise the source of sensitive disclosures. For example, should a user express concern about their privacy in a submission, I employ disguise (Reagle, 2022). However, in the present work, all reports of public content are “meta,” about Reddit itself rather than personal disclosures, with one exception: I associate the first message on r/AmItheAsshole with the identity of an interviewee with permission. Therefore, all messages are cited as public sources (Bruckman, 2002)
The handful of interview subjects appearing within this report agreed to be paraphrased or quoted under an identity they chose. They are part of a larger group of interviewees associated with the founding or moderation of the discussed subreddits. They all used an existing Reddit username or real name; none chose to be cited via a new research-specific pseudonym.
There are thousands of active subreddits where advice is frequently exchanged. A database dump of the top forty thousand subreddits yields 96 subreddits with “advice” in their name (Watchful1, 2024). Alternatively, using the “communities” search facet on Reddit returns 137 subreddits, 88 of which have “advice” in their name (Advice communities, 2024). Those without advice in their name might have it in their description, such as r/sex and r/Parenting, or have flairs for the topic, such as r/teenagers and r/raisedbynarcissists.
Advice is inherent to human conversation, so it is found almost everywhere on Reddit. However, the following focuses on the development of the genre: “venues dedicated to anonymously seeking advice before an audience” (Reagle, 2024b). On Reddit, that includes subreddits dedicated to disclosure, suggestion, judgement, and the meta subreddits that reproduce and compile advice-related content. I prioritize my focus based subreddits’ historical priority, size, and popularity.
There were few subreddits for the first years of Reddit’s life (founded on June 23, 2005); the earliest included r/reddit.com, r/nsfw, r/programming, r/science, and r/politics (Panek, 2024).5 Activity in r/reddit.com dominated the others, and users often requested that more forums be created. On January 22, 2008, Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, announced that “We added a handful of new features last night,” including the “ability for users to create their own reddits.” This also means that “moderators of a reddit will be able to remove posts and ban users from their reddits” (Huffman, 2008).
The period following Huffman’s announcement has been characterized as Reddit’s “Cambrian Explosion” (Olson, 2013). Like the evolutionary proliferation of animals some 530 million years ago, the archeology of Reddit shows subreddits competing with and begetting other subreddits; and while some are disproportionately popular, most are dead ends of inactivity. During the first five years of this period, the number of subreddits increased precipitously; since then, they’ve continued to increase, albeit not as quickly. In 2017, Reddit reached a million subreddits; in 2024, there were over three million – with about a hundred thousand reported to be “active” (Metrics for Reddit, 2024; Corporate, 2023).
One of the first subreddits that emerged after Huffman’s announcement arose from a popular genre of questions on r/reddit.com. For example, before the announcement, someone posted to r/reddit.com: “Ask reddit: Where’s the best place to be an American expat?” ([deleted], 2007) After the announcement, r/AskReddit (2008-Jan, 45.9M) was forked as a specialized forum “to ask and answer questions that elicit thought-provoking discussions.” One of the first questions posted was: “Ask Ask Reddit: Do I Still Have To Put ‘Ask Reddit’ First?” (brtw, 2008). (This was the fourth post, preceded by a “Star Wars guide to Presidential Candidates,” a request that older “Ask Reddit” content from r/reddit.com be ported to this subreddit, and a test message.)
r/ask (2008-Mar, 833K) was created the same year, causing some confusion about why there were two related subreddits and exemplifying a convergence of focus. This seeming redundancy is an inherent consequence of user-created subreddits, prompting perennial questions such as “Why Is There Both an ‘Ask’ and an ‘Askreddit’ Subreddit?” Two of this question’s top answers were that “people need their own fiefdom” and “because we wouldn’t want things to be simple, now would we?” (slimerr, 2009)
Just as in the history of print advice columns (Reagle, 2024b), the early “ask” subreddits were not limited to advice but also included factual questions and requests for opinions. For example, the first post to r/ask, “a place to ask questions,” was about the effect of air pressure on dinosaur morphology ([deleted], 2008b).
Since the emergence of the advice-specific subreddits, r/AskReddit has forbidden most all advice. In 2013, rule #6 stated: “Questions seeking professional advice are inappropriate for this subreddit and will be removed. This includes but is not limited to medical, legal, mental health and financial advice. If you think that you need professional support, please contact a professional in your area” (Ask Reddit…, 2013). By 2022, the “no advice” rule had become rule #2 and banned “personal or professional” advice. Questions should be “generic and not specific to your situation alone.” As a rule of thumb: “If the question is focused on your personal story or is only relevant to your experience, it is not suitable for AskReddit.” Instead, “Askreddit is for open-ended, discussion-inspiring questions” (r/askreddit, 2022). Ironically, posts in advice subreddits can inspire thousands of comments.
The first post to r/relationships (2008-Jul, 3.5M) was about “3 Important Things To Do Before Getting Married. Advice From Those Who’ve Been There” (bridgeco, 2008). This was the title of an offsite article and true to Reddit’s origins as a link-sharing forum. Even so, self posts soon appeared. By July 2010, the subreddit was almost exclusively Redditors sharing their own questions, advice, and stories.
Before 2010, though, there was trouble on r/AskReddit. u/Saydrah had created a following with her sage responses to relationship questions, and “a lot of people got annoyed that the subreddit was being taken over by this specific niche” (Lester and Zadegan, 2022). Some even likened u/Saydrah’s fans to a “cult” ([deleted], 2009d).
In response to this contention, Ryan Lester, still a high-schooler in 2009, created r/relationship_advice (2009-Jun, 11.9M). This was a second-order forking and specialization: r/reddit.com → r/AskReddit → r/relationship_advice. One of the first posts announcing the subreddit was titled: “Relationship advice - the title is self-explanatory. Hopefully this will keep pissy redditors like Vomitron from having to deal with submissions about teenage love in /r/AskReddit” ([deleted], 2009b). Lester later told me, “I made Saydrah a mod and she basically ran the thing for a while and grew it from zero users to a bunch” (Lester and Zadegan, 2022). One early fan even proposed a “motion to change the title of this subreddit to ‘ask Sayrah’” ([deleted], 2009a).
Curiously, r/relationships was not seen as an alternative venue for those getting annoyed with relationship talk on r/AskReddit. r/relationships started as a link-sharing sub, and its community was less active than u/Saydrah’s. This redundancy is our first example of how the bushy tree of subreddit evolution can be challenging to follow. The most famous case of this is that r/trees, created in 2009, is “for anything and everything cannabis” (r/TwoHotTakes, 2024). To discuss actual trees, you must visit r/marijuanaenthusiasts, created in 2012: “Despite the name, we’re all about trees! Yes, the large woody plants that grow in the ground” (r/marijuanaenthusiasts, 2024).
Another example of confusing subreddit evolution is that others can co-opt a sub, transplanting the branch. In response to the perennial question about why there were two large relationship subs, u/Sommiel answered that former moderators of r/relationship_advice had been looking to create “a kinder, gentler version” of the sub.
A few of us were mods in there [r/relationship_advice], and didn’t like the complete lack of organization and [the] other mods that would actually troll users. /r/relationships had been abandoned and one of us took it over and tried to create some guidelines and policies to keep things calm … and addressing as much abuse as we can. (Sommiel, 2017)
Within a few years, both subs had been established as active venues for advice. r/relationship_advice remains larger, with about fourteen million users to r/relationship’s four million. They do have their differences in moderation philosophy and rules. The former prohibits posts involving people under eighteen, referring them to r/teenrelationships. The latter prohibits specific type of content including politics. They both encourage TLDR (too long didn’t read) summaries. TLDR: r/relationships started as a link-sharing sub, was overshadowed by the r/relationship_advice diaspora from r/AskReddit, and was then taken over by a group of dissatisfied moderators of r/relationship_advice.
Six months after Huffman’s announcement, r/Money (2008-Jul, 427K) was created as a link-sharing sub. Unfortunately, most links were spam, many of which were to financial scams. In 2011, a Redditor noted that r/Money needed “fixing.” Oddly, the sub was labeled as NSFW, and “after a bit of prodding, I found that it was created by a blogspammer” (reseph, 2011). They took over its moderation, but the sub continued to struggle with spam for years ([deleted], 2014). Today, it is actively moderated by a handful of Redditors, but is surprisingly modest given its vintage (one of the first subreddits) and name (which can be accessed at money.reddit.com).
r/Money’s struggles are likely a consequence of being overshadowed by r/personalfinance’s (2009-Feb, 19M). Reddit’s most popular finance advice sub started as a (genuine) link sub for its first two years and then transitioned to a self-sub for the next two. Today, it is a vibrant subreddit where members can “learn about budgeting, saving, getting out of debt, credit, investing, and retirement planning. Join our community, read the PF Wiki, and get on top of your finances!” (r/personalfinance, 2024)
People need advice for more things than just relationships and money. On July 09, 2009, r/Advice was created as “Your Home PC Helpdesk” (dsainz3, 2009). Today, it describes itself as “a place where you can ask for advice on many subjects,” though most posts relate to interpersonal issues. Two weeks later, r/needadvice was also created: “Hopefully This Can Be a Place People Can Come to Get Advice for Their Problems. Reddit Has Helped Me with Things, and I Do Hope We Can Do That for Others!” (redsnow, 2009)
r/needadvice persists, with about a third of r/Advice’s one million users, and you can find queries about things other than interpersonal issues. When it was created, there was a discussion as to whether r/needadvice was redundant with other subreddits, with one Redditor writing, “I’m actually hoping this subreddit folds and the mods go back to make AskReddit better ‘edited’ and more effective” ([deleted], 2009c) This conversation didn’t mention r/Advice, which was created just two weeks earlier.
In the evolution of advice subreddits, it is not uncommon for a related subreddit to spawn without knowledge of an existing subreddit and to have converging topical foci.
In the month following Huffman’s announcement, r/Health (2008-Feb, 2.3M) was created as a subreddit for link sharing and discussion; it remains so today. This is also a popular topic for advice queries. r/medical was created in 2009 “for people with specific but often awkward questions about their body and how it works. Intended to be like AskReddit, but for Medical questions only” (r/medical, 2022). r/health_advice was created the same year, though a Redditor worried that “This subreddit could get dangerous. I suggest you make people provide citations on their medical advice at least” (level1, 2009).
Worries about the feasibility and liability of medical advice were merited. r/health_advice was “banned due to being unmoderated” years ago, though there are no records of when it was pruned. In fact, earlier Redditors could discuss medical topics, abstractly, or ask for crowdsourced diagnoses, medical recommendations were forbidden by Reddit’s first “User Agreement” (i.e., terms of service). The earliest versions of this document are missing, but starting in 2014, following the appearance of r/AskDocs, some moderators wondered if there had been a change as they, following Reddit’s earlier policy, forbid medical advice on their subs. As one moderator wrote: “A long time ago when I started on r/AskMen we created a rule banning medical advice based on the then-rules of reddit (thought). I tried to find the rule now, and cannot find it anywhere. Was there ever, or is there a restriction on this?” (Uphoria, 2014) In 2017, a moderator of r/Blind (fastfinge, 2017) asked the same thing. Other mods responded that the earliest agreement was generic “CYA [cover your ass] stuff”; once advice subreddits became common as Reddit matured, this constraint was removed.
Today, people ask for and receive health advice on generic subreddits, such as r/AskDocs, and within more focused subreddits, such as r/AskMen. Subreddits have their own purposes, moderators, and policies and are the products of typically messy evolution. Nonetheless, we can discern features of populism, respect for expertise, and coping with possible embarrassment among health-advice subreddits. In order of oldest to youngest:
r/AskDocs’ popularity is likely a result of its expert-connoting name, though all of these subreddits, except the small r/Healthadvice, provide verified flairs for users with medical expertise. Oddly, r/Healthadvice, “made by healthcare professionals,” does not do so but instead warns that “if you are a healthcare professional you are well aware of HIPAA and what violates it. Any submission that is suspected as a possible violation will be removed” (r/Healthadvice, 2022).
The relationships between r/AskDocs and its predecessors are not clear. The sub was founded by u/Dvdrummer360, someone with medic experience. Within a day of founding the sub, he welcomed their first verified doctor. Two days later, u/Dvdrummer360 announced that “unfortunately our only doctor officially verified turned up fake.” After some “digging” he found that the credential could be easily fabricated (Dvdrummer360, 2013a). Two months later, he welcomed u/DocJ2786, “a physician who graduated from Ross University School of Medicine” (Dvdrummer360, 2013b). u/DocJ2786 was made a moderator, wrote many of the subreddit policies, and promoted its growth. He also is the only mod of r/ShouldIGototheDoctor, which, in its wilted state, still receives the occasional question. u/DocJ2786 was surprised the sub existed and told me that he became its moderator to “join forces” but it apparently was never removed or locked (DocJ2786, 2024).
Just as r/relationship_advice overshadows its predecessor r/relationships, r/legaladvice (2009-Oct, 2.6M) overshadows r/legal (2008-Apr, 169K). And like the relationship subs, there’s a topical convergence between the two. This has been the case for a long time; back in 2012, someone asked if the legal subs could be merged. The answer: r/legal was for questions “on the likely outcome of Obama-care after the Supreme Court gets done with it. r/legaladvice is where people go when they want legal advice for a certain predicament.” Even so, the OP replied, “19/20 posts on the front page are better suited for /r/legaladvice. Perhaps a sidebar link is in order” ([deleted], 2012).
Perhaps r/legal did add a sidebar link to r/legaladvice, but it doesn’t exist today, even as the topical overlap persists. Instead, there is a link to a “Free Legal Aid” resource and rules against “illegal advice” (to commit a crime), against misinformation, and an exhortation that “ACAB [All Cops Are Bastards] is not legal advice” (r/legal, 2024).
r/legaladvice, however, has many links in its sidebar. There is a link to r/legaladviceofftopic (2015-Dec, 359K) “for general discussion about the law, legal theory, and hypothetical situations” (r/legaladvice, 2024). (r/legaladvice’s off-topic sub is three times the size of r/legal; perhaps this is why the latter chooses not to drive traffic to the former.) Because legal advice is specific to its jurisdiction, the sidebar links to legal advice subs specialized for Mexico and Canada, The European Union, The Netherlands, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
Like health advice, legal advice is consequential, exposing the receiver to risk and the giver to liability. However, unlike most health advice subs, verifying credentials is rare. The tiny r/AskALawyer subreddit (2011-Feb, 55K) is willing to verify professional standing. Still, not all mods agree with the practice, including the author of the sub’s sticky post that warns that the process is “very light”: “No reasonable person should believe they are getting actionable legal advice from practicing lawyers in their jurisdiction on this or any sub. Asking questions here is more for ‘vibe check’ purposes” (anthematcurfew, 2024).
r/legaladvice purposefully avoids verifying members’ professional standing. u/Zanctmao, a lawyer and moderator, told me that they don’t want early-career lawyers using the forum to trawl for clients. And they don’t want users to think they are getting legal counsel. Issues around client-lawyer privilege and confidentiality would be a mess in a public forum. However, the subreddit is “a place to ask simple legal questions” about interactions with police, government agencies, landlords and tenants, etc. (The ownership of and responsibility for trees is a perennial topic, with its own subreddit r/treelaw.) In our interview, u/Zanctmao said that: “Most people have interactions with the law all day long, and somebody who’s worked in child protective services or is an insurance adjuster or a home inspector is going to have a lot more relevant knowledge than I would as an attorney in many cases” (Zanctmao, 2024). The sub does have a flair for “Quality Contributors” (QC), which includes lawyers, social workers, police, and others with subject-matter expertise.
Occasionally there are Redditors who claim police dominate the sub, but that’s never been the case. A Vice story on the subreddit from 2018 reported that about 60% of the twenty-one mods at the time were lawyers. The others tended to be “subject matter experts” associated with law enforcement and child protective services (Clark, 2018). A 2021 posting noted that only two out of the thirteen active mods had law enforcement backgrounds (UsuallySunny, 2021). u/Zanctmao explained, this belief is “one of those pieces of urban lore”: “Yes, we have had police officers who are moderators, and some who are quality contributors. And why? Because they know police procedure. When somebody’s asking if their rights were violated during an arrest, to have somebody who knows the tests that the feds have laid down for a car search is actually very useful” (Zanctmao, 2024).
r/Vent describes itself as “the original venting subreddit since 2008.” Technically, this is true. However, r/self, “a place to post discussions, questions, or anything else you like,” includes such content and preceded it by four months. And r/Vent was not actively used until 2012, which is when r/venting, created in 2011, also caught its stride. r/Vent has a few hundred thousand subscribers and invites OPs to “share your stress with us”; in return, others “can give you insight, and take some of that weight off your shoulders.” Despite the mention of shared insights, a sticky post warns that “this isn’t /r/Advice or /r/AskReddit” and recommends other subs to querists (r/Vent, 2024; AutoModerator, 2024). The smaller r/Venting’s description is more therapeutically oriented: there’s a stronger sense of communal care and use of therapy-speak. r/Venting is “a space for you release your thoughts and feelings without fear of judgment.” It is a “supportive and empathetic environment” where users can “share your experiences, give and receive advice, and provide encouragement to others” (r/venting, 2024).
r/confessions was created in December 2008—the end of the first year of user-created subreddits. Its first post was just that: “I confess that I only posted this for the sake of having the first post on the confessions subreddit” ([deleted], 2008a). It’s second post and announcement on r/newreddits eagerly anticipated brother-incest stories. The subreddit’s description speaks to both the writer and the reader: “Get that nasty secret off your chest or simply use this as a place to vent. See the unfiltered opinions of strangers.” It has over a million subscribers, three moderators, no rules, and retains the edgy and prurient ethos of wrongdoing and taboo evident from its start.
r/offmychest was created about a year later (October 2009), has over three million subscribers and a dozen moderators, it has five times as many submissions as its predecessor, and a set of rules befitting a top subreddit. It describes itself as “a mutually supportive community where deeply emotional things you can’t tell people you know can be told. Whether it’s long-standing baggage, happy thoughts, or recent trauma, posting it here may provide some relief. We’ll listen, and if you want, we’ll talk. We aim to keep this a safe space.” Like other popular subreddits where people ask for help, it attracts those who prey on well-meaning members of the community. As the sticky post on the topic notes, the sub is “read by millions of people, and scammers around the world know this” (r/offmychest, 2024; AutoModerator, 2022). Therefore rule #3 is that submissions must “seek only emotional support.” No material solicitations, offers, or even hints about money are permitted. The rules also states that “all comments must constructively support [the] OP.” Though advice is not in the subreddits’ name, it is often given, except when the OP has used the flair “No Advice Wanted (NAW).” The popularity of the subreddit and its rules has, naturally, prompted splinters. For example, r/TrueOffMyChest (founded in 2013), is more lenient and tends toward more controversial content. Yet its own success, with over two million subscribers, also requires a sizeable moderation team, set of rules (including “no financial transactions”), and prompted r/TruOffMyChest, its own mispelled, tiny, and moribund splinter. This subreddit lineage exemplifies differentiation of moderation approaches.
Throughout the history of twentieth-century newspapers, the most popular advice columnists were women (i.e., starting with Beatrice Fairfax’s “Advice to the Lovelorn” in 1898) (Golia, 2016). The columns appeared in the women’s and then lifestyle pages of newspapers, and their audiences remained mostly women throughout the twentieth century. But men read the columns too, and Abby, Ann, and their figurative advice sisters welcomed letters from everyone. And though “agony aunt” was part of their persona (Parker, 2020), columnists were not always asked for advice qua woman.
Advice on Reddit evolved differently. Redditors need not reveal much about themselves, including race, age, gender, or sexuality. We know, however, that most Redditors are men (roughly 64%), and they are active in creating and moderating advice subs (Ceci, 2024). These demographics were even more skewed in its first decade when young men sought advice qua men. A case in point: r/malefashionadvice (2009-Sep, 5.7M) was the third major “advice” subreddit to appear, after r/Advice and r/relationship_advice. r/femalefashionadvice (2010-Dec, 4.5M) followed more than a year later. The tiny r/fashionadvice (2011-Feb, 58K) is “for men and women” and “all are welcome to ask and answer”; most of the queries are about how to style dresses, skirts, and blouses (r/fashionadvice, 2024).
If the gender of the querist can be significant on Reddit, the advisor’s gender is even more so. r/Ask descendants include r/AskWomen (2010-July, 5.5M) and r/AskMen (2010-August, 6.0M), as well as r/askwomenadvice (2014-Feb, 301K) and r/AskMenAdvice (2014-Oct, 64K). History shows that when a subreddit was created to ask women, one for men soon followed. However, asking men for advice, qua men, is unpopular given r/AskMenAdvice only has a fifth of its sister’s subscribers. Another aspect of differentiation is the size of the subreddits’ rules and moderator teams: r/askwomenadvice has twelve detailed rules and ten moderators, some of whom have a tenure of six years; r/AskMenAdvice has three terse rules and three moderators with a maximum tenure of two years. They are similar in that neither permits asking for physical feedback. Whereas r/askwomenadivce states they “will not provide feedback on your social or dating profile pictures,” r/AskMenAdvice recommends Redditors “post pictures for rating to r/amiugly” (r/AmItheButtface, 2024, 2024).
Though r/AmItheAsshole (2013-Jun, 15.5M) is a relative latecomer among popular subs on Reddit, it is well-known outside of Reddit. “AITA,” as it is sometimes referred to, has been the subject of mainstream stories, including in The Guardian (Matei, 2020; Manasan, 2023), at Buzzfeed (Beaulac, 2021), and on public radio (Tung, 2020). Posts in the subreddit are also the subject of what I call syndication: they appear on external podcasts, blogs, and video channels dedicated to retelling and discussing Reddit threads. However, whereas traditional advice columnists have some control over and compensation for their syndicated work, Reddit’s original posters (OPs), commenters, and mods have no such control; OPs sometimes object to their stories appearing offsite.
One reason for r/AmItheAsshole’s success is its mission to serve as “a catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us, and a place to finally find out if you were wrong in a real-world argument that’s been bothering you” (r/AmItheAsshole, 2024). Most everyone has wondered who was in the wrong at some moment in their life. On the subreddit, you tell your story about a (non-violent) conflict, and, after 18 hours, a bot tallies the comments and labels the post as YTA (you are the asshole), NTA (not the asshole), ESH (everyone sucks here), NAH (no asshole here), or INFO (more information needed) (r/AmItheAsshole FAQ, 2022). Writers get to vent, though they are supposed to present both sides and think through their situation; commenters get to gossip and philosophize; readers experience vicarious drama, vote, and possibly gain moral edification. Commenters can also “distinguish themselves in their mastery of asshole judgment. If your top level comment has the highest number of upvotes in a thread, you will get a flair point.” Cumulative points determine a user’s flair, beginning with the “Partassipant” (1 point) and culminating with the “Galasstic Overlord” (1500 points) (r/AmItheAsshole FAQ: How do I get user flair?, 2023). Data that r/AmItheAsshole’s “botmaster” shared with me indicates that 86 commenters have achieved the rank of “Craptain” (150 points). Five Redditors have received 1000 such points, with one receiving 1,500 (phteven_j, 2024; Reagle, 2024a)!
Another reason for the sub’s success is its compelling origin story and vocal cheerleader.
Marc Beaulac is a photographer with varied side hustles. When he created the subreddit, he had been working as the “house photographer for a quality furniture collection.” As sometimes happens, there was a conflict over the office thermostat: “I wanted to ask the Internet and AskReddit just didn’t do it for me.” He had submitted his question to r/AskReddit several times, “but they never agreed that it fit their rules or format, no matter how I restated it” (Beaulac, 2023).
In 2013, Beaulac launched r/AmItheAsshole with his story of working long hours at the office where he was obliged to wear a suit. A coworker, who was in the office less frequently, “comes in dressed in designer clothes fit for going to the beach on a hot day and announces that it’s too cold in here.” Beaulac posted that because “I can’t wear less and be dressed appropriately… I told her to wear a freaking sweater and left the AC on. Am I the Asshole?” ([deleted], 2013) Beaulac created a fork r/AskReddit where Redditors could ask for judgement.
Though I consider r/AmItheAsshole an (important) advice subreddit, it claims otherwise. The subreddit’s rules state: “This is NOT an advice sub. All submissions that ask for advice (instead of or in addition to judgment) will be removed. This sub is for arbitration. You may include advice when you make your comments, but remember that your primary objective in commenting is to assign blame and pass judgment” (r/AmItheAsshole Rules, 2024). Even so, asking for an outside perspective and judgment is advice-seeking. The querist is asking for advice on how to understand their situation. Commenters do that through their judgments, which they explain with discussions of opposing values, difficult personalities, and ethical analogies. Most always, commenters give additional “recommendation[s] regarding a decision or course of conduct,” as Merriam-Webster defines “advice” (Advice definition & meaning, 2023).
Typical of subreddit evolution, r/AmItheAsshole wasn’t really needed when it spawned, Beaulac’s first post was well suited for r/amiwrong (2011-Apr, 421K), created nearly two years before. r/amiwrong is overshadowed by r/AmItheAsshole at about a third of the latter’s size; it invites Redditors to “describe a situation or scenario, providing all relevant information. Then seek the opinion of the masses. Were you ethically or morally wrong? See what sides the internet takes” (r/amiwrong, 2024).
Beaulac learned about r/amiwrong several years after creating r/AmItheAsshole (Beaulac, 2023). Even though there’s only a single moderator, who is not nearly as active as they once were, the sub remains active—and fodder for social media syndication. When I asked Beaulac why he thought r/AmItheAsshole came to overshadow its predecessor, he spoke of three reasons: “Am I the Asshole?” is a more interesting name; early on, he promoted the sub by mentioning it in popular threads in larger subreddits; and the voting, user flairs, and puns “prompt people to keep their tone light and fun, not stodgy or holier-than-thou” (Beaulac, 2023). Given that there are around two thousand “Certified Proctologists” (with at least twenty top-level comments) on r/AmItheAsshole, some people are diligent with their fun.
As r/AmItheAsshole became popular, the moderators banned specific topics. Stories about romance, sex, health, revenge, and violence are forbidden today. The sub is for the “frustrated moral philosopher in all of us,” and these topics generate more heat and potential harm than moral illumination. Yes, the sub is known for its stories of conflict and drama, but moderators seemingly favor reasoned disagreement made in good faith. It is not r/ChangeMyView, but it has elements of that ethos.
It is ironic that a subreddit born of Beaulac’s frustration with r/AskReddit’s restrictions has so many of its own, but large and successful subs tend to have strong moderation as a matter of necessity and differentiation. One Redditor, reflecting on the differences between related subs, noted that on r/AmItheAsshole, “the mods are very very active, as you’d hope for a sub that’s so big and busy” (Cryptographer_Alone, 2023).
Those discontented with r/AmItheAsshole moderation can always split off alternative subs; there are over twenty “Am I the” related subs with at least a thousand members. Beaulac himself created (forked) r/AmItheButtface (2019-Aug, 103K) as a release valve (flignir, 2019).
Welcome to r/AmItheButtface: the cool, relaxed, bastard nephew of /r/AmItheAsshole. Is your primary question about a hookup or breakup? Is there not enough conflict in your moral conundrum? Are you one of those yahoos who insist Ross and Rachel were on a break and want to solicit the ’net’s opinion? Do you frequently dwell on a confrontation that will probably never happen to you? Well, look no further because AmItheButtface is here to fill that void. Approach, ye wretched wanderers, and be judged. (r/AmItheButtface, 2024)
There are five other prominent AITA-related subreddits, each serving a different role.
Redditors can choose among dozens of similar subreddits based on their size, activity, rules, level of moderation, demographics, and culture. For example, r/AmItheAsshole still has a “reputation for having a lot of teens and early 20s people on it, which means that sometimes more mature/nuanced views get downvoted heavily.” Also, while r/TwoHotTakes is emerging as a forum with native content, “there’s also a lot of karma farming going on with people screen-capping r/AITA posts” (Cryptographer_Alone, 2023).
These subreddits are part of an ecology—to continue using biology metaphors. r/AmItheAsshole purposefully sired r/AmItheButtface and r/AITAFiltered. Also, someone who moderates r/AmITheAngel and r/AmITheDevil told me that, topically, “they’re practically the same.” What differs is the communities and moderation; for example, users in r/AmITheAngel are more likely to call out fakes, but things get nastier in r/AmITheDevil, with users also reporting each other to the mods more often (Fluffinn, 2023). Finally, a podcast that cultivates and syndicates Reddit stories about “relationships, dating, conflicts, or AITA” has started to become a community generating its own content.
Three days after Huffman’s announcement, r/bestof (2008-Jan, 5M) was created to curate and discuss the best Reddit posts (r/bestof, 2024). Subreddits about Reddit are referred to as “meta,” and there are only a few forums on the platform that merit their own “best of,” and they are about advice.
We’ve already encountered r/AITAFiltered (2019-Dec, 133K), which includes controversial r/AmItheAsshole threads where the community was divided in its judgment (i.e., at most 70% of the votes were the same). This is populated by a bot for readers who enjoy discussing substantive moral dilemmas (r/AITAFiltered, 2024).
If a “meta” sub is for discussing Reddit itself, r/TwoHotTakes (2021-May, 591K) is doubly meta and also not meta. It is a sub for discussing a podcast that discusses Reddit (doubly meta), and it is a sub in which people now ask for advice directly (not meta).
“Best of” can also serve as a release valve. On r/legaladvice, the moderators are focused and forceful: if an OP is going to get good advice, they’ll typically get it within 12 hours. Discussion after that is likely to be digressive and is locked by the mods. Consequently, r/bestoflegaladvice (2014-Nov, 861K) curates “all the greatest posts from /r/legaladvice” and permits continued discussion outside of the aggressive moderation of its progenitor (r/bestoflegaladvice, 2024). As the mods describe it, r/bestoflegaladvice is “for a more relaxed and humorous meta discussion of the ‘legal’ advice offered elsewhere on Reddit” (r/legaladvice, 2024).
The ability to continue the conversation is one of Reddit’s most compelling attributes. A frustration inherent in reading print advice columns is not knowing what happened in the end. Print, typically, doesn’t lend itself to interaction and updates, and the letters and advice have to be brief, so much so that some columnists cultivate a reputation for pithiness. Even in columns where users could interact, they had to be telegraphically terse, i.e., “Columnites” in The Detroit News, from 1919–1948, and “Chatters” in The Boston Globe, from 1884–2006, (Golia, 2021a; Reagle, 2024b).
On Reddit, a typical post is about four hundred words; larger ones can be three to five thousand words. Tens of thousands of words might follow in the comments, including those from the OP; it can be like reading a novella. Readers become invested in the story and message the OP with private advice, support, and requests for an update. Was the advice followed, and what, ultimately, happened?
Even if more common than in print, Reddit updates are rare because most users abandon or delete their accounts over time, especially those using “throwaway” accounts. Updating a post can also be difficult because mods often delete stories and lock threads. But there are enough updates that dedicated Redditors compile about ten stories a day in r/BestofRedditorUpdates. These users trawl Reddit’s archives for compelling posts and weave together narratives spanning time (sometimes years) and space (across submissions, comments, and user pages). The five most popular sources for the sub are r/AmItheAsshole, r/relationship_advice, r/relationships, r/legaladvice, and r/TIFU (Today I Fucked Up). The offsite column and forum “Ask A Manager” is also a popular source for r/BestofRedditorUpdates.
One of the satisfactions of r/AmItheAsshole, the subreddit for “the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us,” is seeing whether your judgment aligns with that of others. Advice subreddits also appeal to us as soothsayers, seen in frequent comments such as “I predict this isn’t over” or “I give this relationship six months.” The updates provide the satisfaction of seeing if one’s predictions were correct. Even if no advice is solicited on meta subreddits, they are part of the advice genre, akin to those writing to a print column to comment on previous letters and responses.
This sense of satisfaction is central to BORU’s origins. Its creator, u/bestupdator, told me, “I started the sub to share interesting stories with my dad. He likes to adjudicate tricky situations, and going over the stories is a way to relate to him.” For Father’s Day or his birthday, she’ll print a booklet called “Dad’s Book of Dilemmas.” (Her parents don’t use Reddit or most social media.) Then, about 3–6 people will gather: “As a retired teacher, he enjoys reading them out loud and having the family discuss the issue before learning of the update… My dad taught math and is very matter-of-fact about things. Adjudicating relationship conundrums allows him to think creatively since nuance is required. As a former teacher, I think he really likes reading the passages out loud for us and leading discussion” (bestupdator, 2024).
Successful advice subreddits inevitably inspire offshoots, including rivalrous splinter groups. Just as r/AmItheAsshole was followed by r/AITAH, r/BestofRedditorUpdates (2020 Jan, 1.6M) was followed by r/BORUpdates (2023-Jun, 121K).
In the summer of 2023, Reddit management and the community were at odds. Controversies have beset the platform before: some object to the existence of a subreddit, others object when it is removed. Reddit banned r/Creepshots and its ilk in 2012 (Massanari, 2017).6, r/fatpeoplehate and other hate subs in 2015 (Chandrasekharan et al., 2017), and r/The_Donald in 2020 (Ribeiro et al., 2021). The latest controversy was different.
The 2023 brawl wasn’t about specific subreddits but Reddit’s API (Application Programming Interface), which was related to the company’s desire to be profitable and go public. Reddit’s API is how third-party apps, some moderator tools, and researchers interact with the platform. For example, the popular third-party app Apollo didn’t show Reddit’s ads, costing the company money. Also, the researcher behind the Pushshift service, which archived Reddit content, hadn’t been responsive to the company’s concerns, including those about users’ privacy (Stuck_In_the_Matrix, 2023). And artificial intelligence (AI) companies were likely training their large language models on terabytes of Reddit data. Reddit had long been unusually open with its API, but no more.
When Reddit restricted and put a price on API access, many mods and users were incensed. Moderators lost access to tools that helped them do their (unpaid) work. Users could no longer use their favorite apps. Reddit’s own app was disliked and inaccessible to the sight-impaired. r/Blind and thousands of other subs participated in a 48-hour blackout in protest, starting on June 12. As a r/BestofRedditorUpdates moderator wrote, the changes to the API will “significantly impact volunteer run support subreddits such as r/TranscribersOfReddit and r/DescriptionPlease, which serve to allow visually impaired Redditors to read text images, and receive descriptions of visual content such as videos and images. These volunteers are indispensable to the blind community, because Reddit is the only social media website with no support for alternative text” (amireallyreal, 2023b). Elsewhere, more puckish protests followed. Because Reddit doesn’t place ads on NSFW subs, some mods labeled their subs as such to deprive Reddit of the revenue—and others subsequently filled those subs with porn.
After a poll on r/pics, many subs continued to protest by accepting only pictures of John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight. r/BestofRedditorUpdates joined this campaign, to the annoyance of some. The mods committed to the initial 48-hour protest and possibly beyond. A few weeks in, r/TranscribersOfReddit closed: “the API changes AND the realistic limits on how much work we can take on AND our lack of trust in Reddit as a platform AND the clear disregard for accessibility from Reddit corporate, all taken together, make our work so complicated and intense that we can no longer manage it. Continuing this project is impossible” (halailah, 2023). Shortly thereafter, on June 25, a r/BestofRedditorUpdates mod wrote that though “this is an evolving situation,” they expected their protest “to last until July 1st, at which point either Reddit will stop discriminating [against disabled users] or it will be too late, and even more communities for the blind will have no choice but to close” (amireallyreal, 2023a). A few hours later, a splinter was announced.
On June 25, the founding moderator of r/BORUpdates posted: “Since the old one fell into the hands of John Oliver, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to start a new community to bring you your favorite juicy redditor updates!” (GuineaPigLover98, 2023) Its launch was fractious. The founding moderator’s account was suspended by admins for bad behavior, and the new sub’s rules state: “don’t steal BORU posts” and “do not harass the BORU contributors or other users” (r/BestofRedditorUpdates, 2024).
Ultimately, in the API controversy of 2023, Reddit Inc. seemingly prevailed. The company is said to have made some concessions to moderators and disabled users, but it was an alienating experience for many (joshglen, 2024). Some mods left, and admins replaced others. Some subreddits became impossible to sustain by volunteers, and admins closed others. Some Redditors think the quality of the discussions has declined. But the company’s IPO in March 2024 was successful, in part because of “data licensing arrangements” totaling $203M across two to three years, including $60M from Google AI. Later in the year, Reddit announced its first profitable quarter ever (Roth, 2024).
Just as in nature, environmental changes prompt speciation. The API controversy produced r/BORUpdates, which is a viable splinter, even if a tenth the size of its progenitor.
r/bestofpositiveupdates (2022-05-09, 41k) is a complementary filter of r/BestofRedditorUpdates. This sub is for “fun, positive, or heartwarming updates from all over reddit” (r/bestofpositiveupdates, 2024). Sometimes updaters from r/BestofRedditorUpdates and r/BORUpdates will post there as well. Sometimes, others copy-and-paste the update stories, prompting plagiarism complaints (Schattenspringer, 2024).
To introduce her history of the advice genre to a wider audience, Golia wrote, “Without realizing it, twenty-first-century Redditers—along with millions of other digital participants—engage in a form of virtual communication established in newspaper advice columns a century earlier” (Golia, 2021b, loc. 2) She then extends our already respectable understanding of the genre toward the communities that developed around print columns. Ironically, though, while Reddit is something many people are familiar with, the history of advice on Reddit itself is absent. I follow Olson and Panek by organizing the founding of subreddits into periods (i.e., explosion, judgement, and meta) and describe their relationships in terms of a tree branches (Olson, 2013; Panek, 2024). I categorize and plot the emergence of these subreddits in time (see Figure 1) and describe the ways in which they emerge and relate to one another (see Figure 2 and Figure 3). Table 1 shows many of these relationships exemplified.
| Table 1: Types of Reddit relationships exemplified. | |
| Stage | Subreddits |
| Emerge |
|
| Grow |
|
| Weaken |
|
| Cultivate |
|
Such work depends on being able to find and make sense of large amounts of archival data. Fortunately, individuals in the research and data hoarding community (see r/DataHoarder) have captured snapshots of early Reddit content. True to the issues discussed by digital humanists, the glut of this information, once accessible, is its own challenge (Graham et al., 2015, p. 3; Milligan, 2019). Making sense of this data, including the rendering in Figure 1, requires some software and analytic abilities (i.e., to read and analyze data from “dumps” and the Reddit API). Even then, the intentions and events that precipitated subreddit history are not necessarily in their posts, and traditional qualitative interviews—even if done via messaging—show their worth.
Family relationships are important motifs in the history of the advice genre. Three of the four writers behind the first advice column, John Dunton’s Athenium Mercury (1690), were related by marriage. Emily Post was succeeded by three generations of etiquette columnists (McKay, 2008).7 And though a Washington Post story from 1986 about Esther Lederer (Ann) and Pauline Philips’ (Abby) high school reunion was upbeat (Kastor, 1986), their rift was never fully mended and continued into the next generation. Lederer’s daughter, Margo Howard, continued the advice tradition as “Dear Prudence” and “Dear Margo.” Similarly, Jeanne Phillips continued on as “Dear Abby.” In 2002, Jeanne Phillips appeared on Larry King Live to discuss a controversial column; when she was asked about her aunt’s recent passing from cancer, she lamented that her aunt’s secrecy was “a tragedy”: “I think she had an image she wanted to keep up, and she was afraid that it would leak if she told the family” (Phillips and King, 2002). Jeane Phillips then distributed a “Farewell to Eppie” letter without charge to newspaper syndicates, as the industry considered possible and eager successors. Howard was incensed: her cousin “had no relationship with my mother in decades” and “my mother has not been gone a full week yet, and I am highly offended by Jeanne Phillips’ not-at-all-subtle move to make hay of my mother’s death… This is not about grief, this is about new clients” (Howard quoted in the Landers family feuding reignites, 2002).
On Reddit, on the other hand, r/BestofRedditorUpdates was the result of u/bestupdator’s efforts to spend time with her father—a more pleasant family story. Yet, the eventual splintering of r/BORUpdates entailed conflicts over territory and content. While the original “best of” conflict over John Oliver is past, some tensions remain. In keeping with Reddit’s rule that members of one subreddit should not “brigade” another (i.e., prompt one subreddit’s users to flood another’s), r/BestofRedditorUpdates’ users must wait seven days before relaying news from another subreddit. r/BORUpdates does not have this rule—perhaps they have escaped the notice of other mods and admins. This can lead to confusion, as a r/BestofRedditorUpdates contributor wrote to me, “people comment on my posts or DM me, being pretty rude, and saying that this has already been posted, when it’s actually been posted on the other sub because they don’t have that rule lol” (LucyAriaRose, 2022).
A history of the advice genre on Reddit is even more challenging to investigate and tell than the complicated, multi-generational feud between Ann and Abby. However, as a major platform of the new millennium and the latest chapter in the history of the advice genre, it is just as important.
