Founded in 2005, Reddit began as a simple site for sharing links and grew into a dynamic online community. The platform has empowered its users to do amazing things, like sending each other gifts ("random acts of pizza") and organizing unprecedented online protests against SOPA legislation. The community is absolutely massive, Brian Simpson, a Reddit engineer, explained on a panel at ROFLcon in May. On an ordinary day this past April, Reddit users submitted more than 60,000 links and voted more than 11 million times.
This documentary from PBS' Off Book series looks at this multifaceted community, acknowledging that Reddit has a dark side too. "Its relationship with women is really complicated," Memefactory's Stephen Bruckert says. Two female moderators, who chose to remain anonymous, talk about how they counter the rampant sexism on the site with a Shit Reddit Says subreddit, a platform for "bullying the bullies."
The segment was produced by Kornhaber Brown for PBS.
For more videos from PBS Off Book, visit the YouTube channel.
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